#metaverse pricing

[vijay01]

Metaverse Development Cost becoming the next frontier in digital innovation. As businesses and individuals alike show increasing interest in developing and participating in the metaverse, understanding the associated costs is crucial. India,Scope and Complexity,Development Team Composition, Duration of the Project,Hourly Rates for Professionals, Estimated Project Costs, Additional Costs

[blue-corvid]

Ya know, Facebook has lost like 45 billion dollars fucking up this metaverse thing even though it should be trivially easy.

For only one billion dollars, I would happily tell Mark Zuckerberg how to fix it. That’s 1/45 of the money he’s already spent! That’s a steal!

I’m flexible on that price, but I won’t say by how much. I know how haggling works — the minimum you say you’ll take is the maximum anyone will give you.

@ me, Zuckerberg. Let’s talk.

[bettreworld]

A Green Metaverse is REQUIRED.

[shellwanders]

The Futuristic Revolution You Can’t Miss: IOTA

Hello Nutshells, Welcome, fellow curious minds, to the world of IOTA! What is IOTA? Welcome, fellow curious minds, to the world of IOTA! Prepare to have your understanding of distributed ledger technology revolutionized as we delve into the realm of this innovative creation. At its core, IOTA was crafted with a noble purpose: to provide a secure and scalable infrastructure for the Internet…

[weldersworkshop2020]

Check out this free app — It Pays to Walk 🚶 https://sweatco.in/i/weldersworkshop

[mostlysignssomeportents]

What the fuck is a PBM?

TOMORROW (Sept 24), I'll be speaking IN PERSON at the BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY!

Terminal-stage capitalism owes its long senescence to its many defensive mechanisms, and it's only by defeating these that we can put it out of its misery. "The Shield of Boringness" is one of the necrocapitalist's most effective defenses, so it behooves us to attack it head-on.

The Shield of Boringness is Dana Claire's extremely useful term for anything so dull that you simply can't hold any conception of it in your mind for any length of time. In the finance sector, they call this "MEGO," which stands for "My Eyes Glaze Over," a term of art for financial arrangements made so performatively complex that only the most exquisitely melted brain-geniuses can hope to unravel their spaghetti logic. The rest of us are meant to simply heft those thick, dense prospectuses in two hands, shrug, and assume, "a pile of shit this big must have a pony under it."

MEGO and its Shield of Boringness are key to all of terminal-stage capitalism's stupidest scams. Cloaking obvious swindles in a lot of complex language and Byzantine payment schemes can make them seem respectable just long enough for the scammers to relieve you of all your inconvenient cash and assets, though, eventually, you're bound to notice that something is missing.

If you spent the years leading up to the Great Financial Crisis baffled by "CDOs," "synthetic CDOs," "ARMs" and other swindler nonsense, you experienced the Shield of Boringness. If you bet your house and/or your retirement savings on these things, you experienced MEGO. If, after the bubble popped, you finally came to understand that these "exotic financial instruments" were just scams, you experienced Stein's Law ("anything that can't go forever eventually stops"). If today you no longer remember what a CDO is, you are once again experiencing the Shield of Boringness.

As bad as 2008 was, it wasn't even close to the end of terminal stage capitalism. The market has soldiered on, with complex swindles like carbon offset trading, metaverse, cryptocurrency, financialized solar installation, and (of course) AI. In addition to these new swindles, we're still playing the hits, finding new ways to make the worst scams of the 2000s even worse.

That brings me to the American health industry, and the absurdly complex, ridiculously corrupt Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs), a pathology that has only metastasized since 2008.

On at least 20 separate occasions, I have taken it upon myself to figure out how the PBM swindle works, and nevertheless, every time they come up, I have to go back and figure it out again, because PBMs have the most powerful Shield of Boringness out of the whole Monster Manual of terminal-stage capitalism's trash mobs.

PBMs are back in the news because the FTC is now suing the largest of these for their role in ripping off diabetics with sky-high insulin prices. This has kicked off a fresh round of "what the fuck is a PBM, anyway?" explainers of extremely variable quality. Unsurprisingly, the best of these comes from Matt Stoller:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-lina-khan-pharma

Stoller starts by pointing out that Americans have a proud tradition of getting phucked by pharma companies. As far back as the 1950s, Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver was holding hearings on the scams that pharma companies were using to ensure that Americans paid more for their pills than virtually anyone else in the world.

But since the 2010s, Americans have found themselves paying eye-popping, sky-high, ridiculous drug prices. Eli Lilly's Humolog insulin sold for $21 in 1999; by 2017, the price was $274 – a 1,200% increase! This isn't your grampa's price gouging!

Where do these absurd prices come from? The story starts in the 2000s, when the GW Bush administration encouraged health insurers to create "high deductible" plans, where patients were expected to pay out of pocket for receiving care, until they hit a multi-thousand-dollar threshold, and then their insurance would kick in. Along with "co-pays" and other junk fees, these deductibles were called "cost sharing," and they were sold as a way to prevent the "abuse" of the health care system.

The economists who crafted terminal-stage capitalism's intellectual rationalizations claimed the reason Americans paid so much more for health care than their socialized-medicine using cousins in the rest of the world had nothing to do with the fact that America treats health as a source of profits, while the rest of the world treats health as a human right.

No, the actual root of America's health industry's problems was the moral defects of Americans. Because insured Americans could just go see the doctor whenever they felt like it, they had no incentive to minimize their use of the system. Any time one of these unhinged hypochondriacs got a little sniffle, they could treat themselves to a doctor's visit, enjoying those waiting-room magazines and the pleasure of arranging a sick day with HR, without bearing any of the true costs:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/27/the-doctrine-of-moral-hazard/

"Cost sharing" was supposed to create "skin in the game" for every insured American, creating a little pain-point that stung you every time you thought about treating yourself to a luxurious doctor's visit. Now, these payments bit hardest on the poorest workers, because if you're making minimum wage, at $10 co-pay hurts a lot more than it does if you're making six figures. What's more, VPs and the C-suite were offered "gold-plated" plans with low/no deductibles or co-pays, because executives understand the value of a dollar in the way that mere working slobs can't ever hope to comprehend. They can be trusted to only use the doctor when it's truly warranted.

So now you have these high-deductible plans creeping into every workplace. Then along comes Obama and the Affordable Care Act, a compromise that maintains health care as a for-profit enterprise (still not a human right!) but seeks to create universal coverage by requiring every American to buy a plan, requiring insurers to offer plans to every American, and uses public money to subsidize the for-profit health industry to glue it together.

Predictably, the cheapest insurance offered on the Obamacare exchanges – and ultimately, by employers – had sky-high deductibles and co-pays. That way, insurers could pocket a fat public subsidy, offer an "insurance" plan that was cheap enough for even the most marginally employed people to afford, but still offer no coverage until their customers had spent thousands of dollars out-of-pocket in a given year.

That's the background: GWB created high-deductible plans, Obama supercharged them. Keep that in your mind as we go through the MEGO procedures of the PBM sector.

Your insurer has a list of drugs they'll cover, called the "formulary." The formulary also specifies how much the insurance company is willing to pay your pharmacist for these drugs. Creating the formulary and paying pharmacies for dispensing drugs is a lot of tedious work, and insurance outsources this to third parties, called – wait for it – Pharmacy Benefits Managers.

The prices in the formulary the PBM prepares for your insurance company are called the "list prices." These are meant to represent the "sticker price" of the drug, what a pharmacist would charge you if you wandered in off the street with no insurance, but somehow in possession of a valid prescription.

But, as Stoller writes, these "list prices" aren't actually ever charged to anyone. The list price is like the "full price" on the pricetags at a discount furniture place where everything is always "on sale" at 50% off – and whose semi-disposable sofas and balsa-wood dining room chairs are never actually sold at full price.

One theoretical advantage of a PBM is that it can get lower prices because it bargains for all the people in a given insurer's plan. If you're the pharma giant Sanofi and you want your Lantus insulin to be available to any of the people who must use OptumRX's formulary, you have to convince OptumRX to include you in that formulary.

OptumRX – like all PBMs – demands "rebates" from pharma companies if they want to be included in the formulary. On its face, this is similar to the practices of, say, NICE – the UK agency that bargains for medicine on behalf of the NHS, which also bargains with pharma companies for access to everyone in the UK and gets very good deals as a result.

But OptumRX doesn't bargain for a lower list price. They bargain for a bigger rebate. That means that the "price" is still very high, but OptumRX ends up paying a tiny fraction of it, thanks to that rebate. In the OptumRX formulary, Lantus insulin lists for $403. But Sanofi, who make Lantus, rebate $339 of that to OptumRX, leaving just $64 for Lantus.

Here's where the scam hits. Your insurer charges you a deductible based on the list price – $404 – not on the $64 that OptumRX actually pays for your insulin. If you're in a high-deductible plan and you haven't met your cap yet, you're going to pay $404 for your insulin, even though the actual price for it is $64.

Now, you'd think that your insurer would put a stop to this. They chose the PBM, the PBM is ripping off their customers, so it's their job to smack the PBM around and make it cut this shit out. So why would the insurers tolerate this nonsense?

Here's why: the PBMs are divisions of the big health insurance companies. Unitedhealth owns OptumRx; Aetna owns Caremark, and Cigna owns Expressscripts. So it's not the PBM that's ripping you off, it's your own insurance company. They're not just making you pay for drugs that you're supposedly covered for – they're pocketing the deductible you pay for those drugs.

Now, there's one more entity with power over the PBM that you'd hope would step in on your behalf: your boss. After all, your employer is the entity that actually chooses the insurer and negotiates with them on your behalf. Your boss is in the driver's seat; you're just along for the ride.

It would be pretty funny if the answer to this was that the health insurance company bought your employer, too, and so your boss, the PBM and the insurer were all the same guy, busily swapping hats, paying for a call center full of tormented drones who each have three phones on their desks: one labeled "insurer"; the second, "PBM" and the final one "HR."

But no, the insurers haven't bought out the company you work for (yet). Rather, they've bought off your boss – they're sharing kickbacks with your employer for all the deductibles and co-pays you're being suckered into paying. There's so much money (your money) sloshing around in the PBM scamoverse that anytime someone might get in the way of you being ripped off, they just get cut in for a share of the loot.

That is how the PBM scam works: they're fronts for health insurers who exploit the existence of high-deductible plans in order to get huge kickbacks from pharma makers, and massive fees from you. They split the loot with your boss, whose payout goes up when you get screwed harder.

But wait, there's more! After all, Big Pharma isn't some kind of easily pushed-around weakling. They're big. Why don't they push back against these massive rebates? Because they can afford to pay bribes and smaller companies making cheaper drugs can't. Whether it's a little biotech upstart with a cheaper molecule, or a generics maker who's producing drugs at a fraction of the list price, they just don't have the giant cash reserves it takes to buy their way into the PBMs' formularies. Doubtless, the Big Pharma companies would prefer to pay smaller kickbacks, but from Big Pharma's perspective, the optimum amount of bribes extracted by a PBM isn't zero – far from it. For Big Pharma, the optimal number is one cent higher than "the maximum amount of bribes that a smaller company can afford."

The purpose of a system is what it does. The PBM system makes sure that Americans only have access to the most expensive drugs, and that they pay the highest possible prices for them, and this enriches both insurance companies and employers, while protecting the Big Pharma cartel from upstarts.

Which is why the FTC is suing the PBMs for price-fixing. As Stoller points out, they're using their powers under Section 5 of the FTC Act here, which allows them to shut down "unfair methods of competition":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

The case will be adjudicated by an administrative law judge, in a process that's much faster than a federal court case. Once the FTC proves that the PBM scam is illegal when applied to insulin, they'll have a much easier time attacking the scam when it comes to every other drug (the insulin scam has just about run its course, with federally mandated $35 insulin coming online, just as a generation of post-insulin diabetes treatments hit the market).

Obviously the PBMs aren't taking this lying down. Cigna/Expressscripts has actually sued the FTC for libel over the market study it conducted, in which the agency described in pitiless, factual detail how Cigna was ripping us all off. The case is being fought by a low-level Reagan-era monster named Rick Rule, whom Stoller characterizes as a guy who "hangs around in bars and picks up lonely multi-national corporations" (!!).

The libel claim is a nonstarter, but it's still wild. It's like one of those movies where they want to show you how bad the cockroaches are, so there's a bit where the exterminator shows up and the roaches form a chorus line and do a kind of Busby Berkeley number:

https://www.46brooklyn.com/news/2024-09-20-the-carlton-report

So here we are: the FTC has set out to euthanize some rentiers, ridding the world of a layer of useless economic middlemen whose sole reason for existing is to make pharmaceuticals as expensive as possible, by colluding with the pharma cartel, the insurance cartel and your boss. This conspiracy exists in plain sight, hidden by the Shield of Boringness. If I've done my job, you now understand how this MEGO scam works – and if you forget all that ten minutes later (as is likely, given the nature of MEGO), that's OK: just remember that this thing is a giant fucking scam, and if you ever need to refresh yourself on the details, you can always re-read this post.

The paperback edition of The Lost Cause, my nationally bestselling, hopeful solarpunk novel is out this month!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/23/shield-of-boringness/#some-men-rob-you-with-a-fountain-pen

Image: Flying Logos (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Over_$1,000,000_dollars_in_USD_$100_bill_stacks.png

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

[rekino2114]

Could we please get general relationship headcanons for Futaba and Haru from Persona 5? Thank you!

General relationship headcanons with futaba Sakura and haru okumura

Futaba Sakura

Since futaba is so socially awkward for you to end up in a relationship, you probably had to do the first move, and she's so glad you did.

Dates with her usually include playing video games all day (and night) while eating curry ,coffee (that joker generously prepared ), and energy drinks and junk food.

You two will literally camp outside of a store to wait for the release of a game one of you wants. All you need is a Nintendo switch, a tent,sleeping bags, snacks, and headphones, and you can stay there for hours.

She'd like to buy you games you want but she doesn't have enough money so she does the next best thing:buy you merchandise of games you like, stuff like shirts and pins, she wanted to buy you an action figure once but gave up when she saw the price.

She's not against physical affection, but she doesn't like pda. Even holding her hand in public will make her blush, but in private, she'll cling to you like a koala.

You two definitely have matching wallpapers/computer screens of whatever video game you're currently obsessed with.

Speaking of. She'll try to get you to join whatever fandoms she's into(mainly videogames) and will encourage you to do the same cause the more things you have in common, the better your relationship will be.

Haru okumura

Haru is so sweet and kind, and while you're dating her, you'll realize how lucky you are to have her as your girlfriend.

She likes quiet and classic dates like going to the movies or expensive restaurants(she pays), but a personal favorite of her is just walking in a park holding hands and smelling flowers it's just really relaxing and peaceful.

Haru loves spoiling you with gifts. They can range from a bouquet of flowers or plants from her garden to really expensive stuff you might have shown interest in once.

She's pretty neutral when it comes to pda. She likes receiving affection even in public, but she usually won't initiate things like kisses or hugs even if she loves them in private.

There is an exception though. She loves hand holding just the feeling of having your hand in her, gives her comfort, and makes her feel safe and warm.

She's also pretty protective of you, especially in the metaverse. If any shadow dares to hurt you, they're gonna receive an axe to their face.

You two genuinely love each other so much, and your relationship is so cute and wholesome. You'd do anything for each other.

[kimberleyjean]

Solving the riddle of Good Omens:

See here for a Guide to All the Mysterious "Errors" in Good Omens.

Below are my own meta, but you can also find more on this blog via #ineffable mystery for all mysterious shenanigans, or #good omens meta for all general meta.

Ineffable Detective Agency:

Why are there two scrolls in Before the Beginning?

Were we shown more than one Eden in S1?

Parallels and Motifs:

Saturday Morning Funtime

Newt and Anathema (response to @fellshish)

Missing Pieces / Discontinuity:

Weird camera cuts in E1 and E4 (1941)

Gabriel's Statue

Are Episodes 2 & 3 all mixed up?

Surrender the Angle Sign

The Resurrectionist Pub has two signs?

Saraqael's Map (response to @noneorother)

Fairy Lights

Season 1:

The three baby problem (response to @naniiebimworks)

What did Adam Change? (Part 1)

Overarching Themes:

The Price of a Life: Death and Dying in Good Omens (S1, S2)

Notes on Magic and Good Omens (S1)

Infinity and Mobius Strip Symbols (S1, S2, Book)

Props / Set Analysis:

The Picture Bible

Nina Simone (response to @fellthemarvelous)

Jim's bookshelf:

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (response to @aprilodite)

Good Omens Metaverse / Extra-textual:

The Baftas and Bark Ruffalo

[jimquisition]

Epic Games laid off over 800 people because management decided to gamble on Metaverse Magic Beans. Capcom's boss thinks game prices are too low. What do these two things have in common? They're examples of how industry leaders are irresponsible with their money and pass the consequences onto anybody but themselves.

Also, a special friend returns to The Jimquisition...

(Video's official full title is: Fiscal Responsibility, Or How Game Publishers Keep Painting Themselves Into A Monetary Corner Before Punishing Everybody Else For Their Short-Sighted F**king Stupidity)

[vijay01]

Metaverse Development Cost becoming the next frontier in digital innovation. As businesses and individuals alike show increasing interest in developing and participating in the metaverse, understanding the associated costs is crucial. India,Scope and Complexity,Development Team Composition, Duration of the Project,Hourly Rates for Professionals, Estimated Project Costs, Additional Costs

[megaderping]

I think the funniest thing about Shuake in the context of The Crow Cries at Midnight is the fact that since Shadowkechi has his own ego and thus continues to exist as a separate consciousness within Akechi... It means the Shuake would be Akeshuake in the most literal sense. Ren gets two Goros for the price of one, and one of them is extra polite and just happy to be acknowledged and included. This random tangent from the P4 Akechi AU brought to you by me writing a really sweet scene in a much later chapter that concerns Shadowkechi and realizing how much he enjoys when he is treated like he matters. Though it makes for an interesting challenge for Akechi to navigate, too. Making sure his Shadow's okay with the relationship, figuring out how to balance their own individual needs, especially since outside certain spaces (e.g. the TV world, Metaverse), he can't manifest as easily as separate from Akechi and instead would have to take turns in the driver's seat. And Shadowkechi wondering if he's even wanted or if he's a third wheel, while Ren is the embodiment of the two cakes meme. But it is an incentive for Akechi to talk to the P1/P2 cast about how they manage to summon Personas IRL, since Shadowkechi can assume his more Akechi-shaped form rather than just Robin Hood if he so desires. It might give him chances to one day just... vibe separate from Akechi within a certain radius (so probably can't go extremely far).

[braindeadmaggot]

Warning to all Tumblr friends

There's a new blog on here, @scrumptiousinternetyouth going around messaging me, a bunch of my friends, and many others asking if we want commissions. The only reason why I noticed this specific blog as suspicious is because they messaged mere SECONDS after I liked a photo they posted.

Turns out they've been soliciting and when asked about their work they've shared so much art of completely different styles, it became plainly clear what they were doing.

Here are the sources of the art they're using on their blog.

SIY's comm price list = vs = the original artist's self portrait: @soyochiiii [art link]

NFT art from KPRVerse - a metaverse building crytpo game

Alex Guenther's "Wakanda's Guardian"

this one was hard to find the artist for because there are so few posts. Here's a post from hiatus on twitter earlier this month, and one from @lazytama here on tumblr [original post deleted, link goes to @chibigohan] from March 2019

This blog was created less than a month ago and they're already up to no good. This is not what Tumblr is about.

[ali-dot-txt]

yo i played persona 5 for the first time (I)

(This post is going to be long, and the ones that follow are liable to be even longer)

I started playing Persona 5 Royal on July 4th of this year.

But I did not want to play as this boy.

Why not? I dunno. I didn't want to. I spent far too much time pretending to be a teenage boy in real life, and I felt no particular desire to do it again.

So, what am I to do? Well, seek out a way to play as a girl instead, obviously.

Which is where this comes in:

An in-development mod to let Joker be a girl instead! Exactly the push I needed to convince me to buy Persona 5 Royal.

So, meet Hina Satou, amateur girl and professional assault-charge-haver.

Hina is significantly shorter than regular Joker. Cutscenes are not adjusted to account for this.

Many animations look really messed up. This is just the price of entry to Hina's beautiful story.

It's at this point, just after the beginning of the game, that we notice...

Much of the script is yet to be changed. So Hina is referred to in masculine terms by a lot of the cast for a lot of the game.

You could take this as just a facet of the incomplete mod and pretend that it isn't happening, or you could do what I did:

Hina Satou is trans! And it's 2016.

So if she's trans, then the lines that change are reflective of how the characters see her.

Everyone just thinks she's a guy who cross-dresses, I guess? Look, the headcanon takes some work.

Given how she looks, people probably wouldn't have even known she's trans if her record hadn't been released by Mishima on Kamoshida's orders.

Some script changes are implemented, however.

In contrast to regular Joker, it seems pretty obvious that Hina's hair is not like that out of a deliberate stylistic choice, but because it just literally will not behave.

Another instance of Hina being short in a cutscene

A change to the entire context of a conversation to take into account Joker being a girl. These are, as of now, few and far between.

This scene is unchanged, despite Hina normally using the womens' side in the bathhouse, so it looks like Hina was peer pressured into joining the Bros Bathing Time

She has to be, like, neck deep in the water to pull off this ruse.

You see how this as-yet-incomplete mod changes the context of so many of the game's lines and events.

It's a well-made mod. The new VA work from Alexa Farron is really good, the models and new outfits look great, and the writing changes, where they exist, are excellent. But its currently in-development state means that my trans headcanon works surprisingly well, and that I got more than a few glimpses through the curtain to the original, unmodded script.

So, now you understand the context. Next time: impressions of the game overall, and my slow descent into madness over this headcanon.

(Next post here, and final post here!)

[athena-gunpla]

EGBM 1/144 Entry Grade Custom RX-78-lā-III "Lah Gundam"

My first EG in a while!!! Usually I don't bother with EG but the recent Build Metaverse EG kits look a lot better and have significantly better moulding and design than earlier kits such as the EG RX-78-2 that this kit is based on. The EG Build Strike Exceed Galaxy has design features that are almost on par with HG kits! They're really reasonably priced too - I was able to get this kit for $10AUD through my uni's hobby group.

The build is technically identical to the EG RX-78-2, however the plastic is much higher quality, especially in terms of the colour. The kit even comes with beam effects for the beam naginata, while the original EG RX-78-2 notably lacked beam saber effects.

The beam effect parts are even slightly UV reactive!

I managed to borrow a blue Gundam Marker to add in the sensor colour for the head cameras and the targeting sensor on the beam rifle, and this really elevates the kit to on-par with my HG kits.

I'm really happy with this EG and very tempted to get the other Build Metaverse EG kit, if for nothing else but customisation. My one complaint is that it has the one-piece EG hands, which look rather cheap and flat, and that the kit lacks any open hand moulds. I've actually borrowed some from other kits for these photos. This isn't really a major issue, however, as many HG kits also lack extra hand moulds.

Overall, if you're new to gunpla and looking for a good kit to start with, I can't recommend this one enough.

[senblades]

my reaction to ch62 (and probably ann's reaction too tbh) is just. GIRL???? (collectively) WHAT THE HELL????

also this May Have Consequences as previously, when okumura's heart got stolen + goro killed him while his shadow still existed, he didn't die like. Immediately. now that he suffered mental breakdown (both the normal and the metaverse kind!!! two for the price of one fight!!!) and heart stolen at the same time, I wonder how this is going to play out for The Gang...

fhjkdshfkd Ann is the only one put together enough to have a reaction that isn't "whatthefuckwhatthefuckwhatthefuck-" and even then it's still pretty close

time will tell.... in less than 24 hours new chapter tomorrow HAHAHA