Grazie per l'ospitalità nella tua istanza Mastodon che è da sempre una vera Agorà dell'amicizia. Un luogo di ricco dibattito, d'informazione e di vera libertà.

"Di che cosa è fatta una vita? Non soltanto di quello che diciamo; né di ciò che facciamo. La nostra vita sono anche le cose che amiamo e in cui crediamo".
Edward Snowden.

Less work? 🤣

I had a garden with wild flowers, it was planted by the previous owner. An horticulturist.

It was beautiful but required a lot of work. Way more than mowing a couple of days a week.

I still tried to keep up, though.

Look at the robo taxi situation they have going. The same tech that is stopping people off in the middle of the road is what is being used for FSD.

I wouldn't be surprised if we found out that the whole thing is a scam and there is some sweat shop full of teenagers remotely driving cars. I feel like the random stops where they shouldn't stop is exactly how someone who learns how to drive playing GTA would drive.

*Feature that is both late and doesn't work properly

Turns off consumers. On top of the fascism...

Up to you. I'm comfortable with:
- buying smaller or indie games
- subscribing to lesser known / low profile / niche content creators
- pirating anything old, hard to buy, or incredibly popular (like people who make 100k+ per month on Patreon)
- avoiding AAA games altogether, with rare exceptions (those I usually buy, or they are F2P)

I'm also comfortable with pirating some content first and later buying/subscribing if I see I keep enjoying the content.

Regardless of what conclusion you develop, some things are always morally acceptable to pirate. For example, Metallica.

/s

On a serious note, IP is a made up concept. Pirate away.

Support the creators who deserve support. Otherwise you will end up with nothing good to pirate, because all the creators who deserved support and made your favourite creations, starved to death (or got other jobs, effectively the same thing)

Your single act of piracy is not likely to make a difference either way, but on the other hand, your single act might indeed be the straw that breaks one particular camel's back. And collectively we have to take some responsibility for that. It's not even just about ethics (although it is ALSO about ethics), it's about self-interest. You can be an individual freerider if you want, but eventually the freeriders overwhelm the system and it shuts down.

Realistically there will always be plenty, plenty of games to pirate. But the key question is, will enough of those be good games, the really enjoyable ones that you want to play? The AAA slop and rehashes will never stop, oh they''ll churn and froth and lay people off and blame pirates but they're effectively self-sustaining, it takes money to make money and it takes money to lose money and there's enough money in the system to keep them churning out sequels and derivative "new IP" until the heath death of the universe. There will always be some good games to pirate and to play no matter what you do, no matter what we all do.

But it's not a binary condition whether our financial support or piracy matters. You vote with your dollars. Your dollars guide the AAA studios in their desperate chase to steal the dollars from us, and your dollars literally enable indie developers to continue their projects at all. If too many people are not rewarding the kinds of novel and well-made games they want to see from AAA studios, and not supporting people's passion projects that they've poured years of their lives into, you're not going to see as many novel and well-made games or passion projects like that happening, and odds are good that at least one of the ones you won't see happening will be one you really would have enjoyed.

I pirate what's any good that I cannot find legally for streaming, as well as educational stuff that I want available should I and/or my family find ourselves without internet access.

Sometimes I'll go so far as to pirate things that I cannot find without ads(even with premiums*), but mostly if it'll let me see the first few minutes before playing an ad, I just live with it.

* The only reason I still have Amazon Prime is for the free shipping. I pay extra for no ads. I pay extra for HiDive. There appear to be things available on Prime with HiDive that aren't available on just Prime or just HiDive. Magically, those shows(Ranma 1/2, for example) have ads. WTF?

None of these companies have ethics. Why should you get hung-up in ethics for a victimless crime?