Just another artifact of the fact that advertiser financed businesses is not robust. And the end of them is likely coming nearer.

Question is: Good for who?

IMO compared to what the base game costs, the price of DLC is often inflated. And this is not limited to Paradox.

If you would split up the base game, with all its base content into separate DLCs, the base game would cost a lot more. And this is what DLC is all about. This is a bit a race to the bottom at how much content can we rip out content from the base game and sell it to the customer with inflated prices separately, without incurring too much of a public shit storm.

DLC also plays with peoples completionists desires. Many just want to have the full experience, so they buy stuff, they would like not do, if it was a separate game.

DLC also fragments the community, mods or multiplayer might not work for someone not owning specific DLC. Yet another psychological manipulation into buying them.

So good for company stockholders, but not really good for people that prefer transparent and consistent pricing and quality.

Currently being vegan or vegetarian is a choice of privilege. An healthy and varied diet becomes more difficult and expensive, when you start removing dishes from your pallet.

So it becomes coupled with a status symbol, instead of being the default way. As long as people call themselves “vegan” or “vegetarian” because of their choice (people being vegan or vegetarian because of mental or medical issues, is different case), they highlight that status over “normal” people.

If people are just not eating meat or animal products for whatever reason, without trying to use labels like “vegan” or “vegetarian” to highlight their status, then that is fine and a personal choice.

Creating societal change, to make vegan or vegetarian the default position, will also lessen the status of the vegans and vegetarians, that use those labels as such. So they have incentives to not produce a political or societal change.

Vegans & vegetarians should go on protests and lobby to make vegan food cheaper and easier than meat, so that it becomes the default. If they don’t do that, and still call themselves vegan/vegetarian then that might imply that it is all about showing their status, and people don’t like that.

Consumer choice is a privilege and not about creating an effective societal/political movement. They should not be used as a status symbol.

(Disclaimer: I eat meat and animal products very infrequently, only when my body demands it. I am also thankful for all vegans and vegetarians, because they gave us more interesting options in stores and restaurants.)

This whole discussion on wherever AI can create art or not is a bit dull IMO.

To me it is clear, only humans can create art, because art is part of a human expression of an novel (to them) inner process and thought. Not everything humans do is art, much of it is repetitive. Humans can use any tools to create stuff, art or no art, including AI. Humans can suck at the actual creation process, but still produce art.

So if someone enters 3 words into a AI generation model, and chooses an image, or something, they are not producing art, they are shopping. If they spend time tweaking and adapting models and prompts to help them realize what they want to express, then they are doing art.