Well I most definitely disagree, they do both. Executives will go to pretty great lengths to look after themselves despite what might happen to them at the next board meeting, skewed profit sharing bonuses, golden parachutes, corporate mantra. (Office politics at that level I’m sure can be quite intense). And as long as shareholder’s portfolio’s keep going up, they’re really not going to care how nice their investments are to society or the environment etc. Yes, I can be cynical.
Gene Roddenberry would be so happy (precursor to his fantasy land society) if that were ever possible, but I personally do not think it is, sorry. (In our lifetimes anyways)
I think there are a couple of crossed wires in this discussion.
You can make money and be ethical. They are not exclusive. In general, customers and shareholders place some value on being ethical. If they didn’t you wouldn’t see advertising space used to tell consumers about how ethical they are, how recycled their packaging is or how renewable their energy sources are.
If Sony cared about being vaguely ethical, they’d probably increase their profits in the long run… but the higher-ups want max profits NOW!
Those are only done for political reasons after an analysis/projection showing it may increase profits to look like the “good guys”. I mean, it all comes down to projection of profits. I guess I’m saying it is naïve to think otherwise. It’s possible that is too cynical a view of the world, but I don’t think so
I don’t think too, this is exactly how 99.99% of companies work. But I agree with Hrobertson : you can make money and be ethical. And I think that you can make more profits on this way if you are clever enough to find how. The problem is that 99.99% of the companies are not as clever as needed, and in every domain, one day a company arrives with this more clever solution, really more ethical, and answering better to what consumers want, and takes all.
That implies a paradigm shift, companies generally don’t operate under that principal. They are typically cutthroat copycats. You can’t expect an Elon Musk heading up every corporate entity.
I just expect for time to make it happen. I’ll surely never see this with my own eyes (depends on Google research advances :D), but time changes anything, and time makes better solutions happen, and the majority follows the better solution the day it offers more for less. Time just needs guys like Elon Musk, Xavier Niel, etc to accelerate things. When somebody makes a “jump effect” on its domain, the mass follows this effect (lol Mass effect), and “cutthroat copycats” try to copy “Elon Musk’s point of view”
Yep. It has made many good things possible that were never possible before. Does it have problems? Yes, and they are legion. But just as the United States - as a democratic nation - has some serious problems with it, those problems do not constitute a condemnation of democracy.
Are there better systems that the US could put into play? I haven’t seen one. Are there better systems that other nations could put into play? It’s possible. Not everyone has the American temperament.
They DO both, but they don’t EXIST to do those things. That is not their raison d’etre. America sets up dictators and kills people, but that’s not why the nation was founded.
Clearly.
Oh, and I don’t like what I see in No Man’s Sky. I don’t see any gameplay worth my time.
I removed what I agree with (excluding your exchange with Gene).
I totally disagree with you on this part. Capitalism is based on two huge mistakes :
its first basis is the money ; abstract numbers can be used as a basis to identify services and objects by a value (this concept is older than capitalism of course)
The more capital you have, the more you can (including time in the equation is a disaster)
And US, like nearly every nation since men organize their life by “civiliszed groups”, had never been a democracy. The only democracy that respects its basis is the one called direct democracy (based on lottery), and this one too has never really been tried. Like communism never had been implemented correctly, etc…
I agree with you when you think "The problem is not the concept, but the bad implementation ", but the concept of capitalism is not ethical on its basis, and creates “inequations” (see 2.), that generates crises (like the french revolution, that changed nothing but made a systemic error appear (and yes capitalism is older that what we can learn at school))
I’ve seen more beautiful theories, but I’ve never seen anything else that bad implementations of something in reality, so I can agree with you, for a part of what you seem to mean.
sorry you’re right… but this discussion is really interesting, so difficult to not participate…
About NMS, I’m personally surprised that obviously space games fans like you guys could not be enthousiast about this game, and it makes me worrying about how I:BS could be perceived by other space game lovers that currently just know ED, or SC.
Btw, Adam Smith actually insisted on the importance of morale to check the capitalist system (like, for half of his work), and would have been horrified to see what many modern-day capitalists - who are ostensibly following Smith’s (carefully truncated) writings with religious-like fervour - are doing with his legacy.
I agree this thread has diverged greatly from a discussion concerning NMS. Please fork any non-relevant conversation from this point onward or I will simply delete the posts.
Could try a restart again since I do have a question and haven’t seen it in this thread yet (I think, did a quick search and didn’t really find anything).
In the latest video on E3 we saw them jumping in to a random starsystem and landing on a planet and there was a huge spacestation or whatever it was (those octagon looking thingy) and he said it was a unknown, unpopulated system no one has ever been in. Was the spacestation and beacons just planted for the e3 video? Just was a bit weird for me that he jumps into a totally new system and there is a bigass station just waiting there out of nowhere. Or are they part of some kind of ancient alien defence system, like the robots (or am I wrong in that as well) walking around attacking him when he did something bad to the planet.
Or maybe they haven’t addressed those things really.
//edit, I know the game aims for a more arcade type feeling instead of realism but they are aiming for exploration and finding a huge space station in an uninhabited solar system feels weird.
I noticed the space station and I also noticed that he didn’t even mention it so wasn’t surprised by it’s presence.
I don’t doubt that it was a random system that he jumped to, so that leads me to believe that such space stations are not uncommon throughout the galaxy.
Also I think every planet has those upload points and sentinel robots on it!
All-in-all, a very unrealistic and arcadey experience.
We’re not really in a position to state that it’s unrealistic. It’s entirely possible that the galaxy is already extremely well populated by previous high technology civilisations. The types of signature that we look for when trying to find extra terrestrial life is unlikely to be the types of signature they emit. In fact a high technology species is unlikely to waste energy emitting radiation randomly in our direction. Even our own immature species is gradually decreasing the amount information that could be detected beyond our own solar system as we move towards more point to point communication methods.
I quite like the idea of a game that simulates a heavily populated galaxy that is abundant with life and other technological species. If that’s what NMS is going for then it’s quite appealing.
You’re right about it being arcadey. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, I quite enjoy arcade games.
