I love my 09 ranger, one of the last years before they scrapped it and went with the Goliath model.

Honestly don’t see the appeal to the huge trucks unless they’re for work, but it’s not surprising that automakers in North America don’t really care to offer what consumers actually want to drive.

$8.6 million Seems like a paltry amount for buying politicians in several governments when you consider the amount of money wealthy people have.

All the AITA, Two Hot takes, ask reddit etc story based subreddits are something like 95% AI

They often take advantage of the “throwaway” angle, but they all share the same type of name+name+number like Asphalt-Chameleon4593 instead of the classic “throwaway + topic” etc type names genuine people used to make when posting real stories.

Since about 4 months the AI bots have been replying to comments and act more authentic.

There’s often edits to add context a normal person probably would have included, or add things like “we have 9 kids and breaking up is not an option, because we would get deported” or something like that.

Very obvious LLM stuff trying to figure out what people consider normal, or where social boundaries are for things like cheating, stealing, lying, etc.

The Martian when the main airlock blows up.

He ends up taping a plastic sheet over the hole with what I assume is super strong space tape and plastic and then continues to live in the station for 550 more days.

We spend the first half of the movie learning how unforgiving the environment is, and how delicate his ecosystem for life is, but you can also blow half the place up and just tape some plastic over the hole.

They did a much better job of explaining it in the book, but the movie literally went “just tape that bitch up with plastic, then we’ll throw a wind storm at it to prove it’s good forever”

Diamonds actually get their value because a single entity (DeBeers) owns something like 80% of all diamonds in the market.

They dictate the price by throttling supply and naming a price. People are willing to pay as a flex but you are right in that DeBeers markets “real” diamonds and “lab grown”.

It’s mostly done to capture different market segments, and to keep up the value of their stockpile of nearly unlimited diamonds already mined by people who are essentially slaves.

That being said, if there was a market for diamonds soaking in vials of oppressed orphan blood (with provenance of course) DeBeers would absolutely sell it.

If lab grown diamonds became significantly cheaper than slave mined diamonds, DeBeers would still likely keep their mines open to maintain control of the market. Even if they successfully moved consumers on to lab diamonds - can’t have someone else get diamond market share.

Maybe if you’re on shrooms or LSD, yeah “it’s all the same if you use what they make maaaaaaan”

But only if you ignore the power dynamics behind wealth, and aren’t aware of the concepts of bribery, temptation, and unlimited influence.

Or the fact that people want greener options but they are intentionally unavailable, sabotaged, prohibitively expensive (but never subsidized), or publicly demonized in media with disinformation and propaganda.

Between consumers and corporations, only one gets to call all the shots

I haven’t played Baldur’s Gate 3, but the game seems to have done quite well by being a well thought out and executed game.

I tend to avoid advertising as much as possible, so I mostly hear about stuff through Lemmy/reddit and have no idea if there was a massive budget for commercials, events, billboards etc etc.

BG3 was everywhere, not because of advertising, but because people genuinely loved the game and wanted to talk about the game - which makes people interested in looking into the game. Spending tens of millions of dollars trying to make something look enticing is the fastest way to make me think your game wasn’t properly cooked.

It’s pretty rare that a really good game/movie slips through the cracks, not saying that these companies shouldn’t advertise - but a quality product will end up advertising itself through word of mouth.

Would be pretty interesting to see what kind of games companies would produce if most of the marketing budgets were largely spent on improving game quality, playability, and experiences instead.