I'd say it's a different set of values but maybe that's just my cultural perspective.

Tall Poppy is more about egalitarianism and modesty, where standing out or flaunting status too much is discouraged.

Whereas crab bucket is seen as being rooted in envy, jealousy, or a fear of losing status or position.

Everything becomes more expensive once a market for it is created. Meanwhile local foods like murnong and kangaroo apples are free in Australia.

What do we owe to each other? For coexistence without inherent meaning in an afterlife, is the only source of moral good the social contract that we've made with each other to coexist peacefully? What are the bounds of that contract? What are the terms of our coexistence?

We still aren't even close to repairing all the damage from Black Saturday, let alone being at the point of 'recovery'.

I do disaster relief and our organisation is at operating at its limit to cover everything that hits us every year.

I can't imagine how our infrastructure is meant to cope with more of this happening more often.

Aftermath is an independent worker owned cooperative. They rely on subscribers and split the funds amongst themselves.

Anyway here's the article:

We Can’t Keep Doing This Ubisoft's XDefiant is the latest live service game to quickly die

By Nathan Grayson 8:14 PM EST on December 3, 2024

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A major publisher launched a live-service game intended to compete with one of a small handful of industry-eclipsing giants. It did not immediately succeed to the tune of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. Now studios are shutting down and workers are getting laid off. Just another Tuesday in the video game industry.

The latest victim of what’s effectively become a cycle is Ubisoft’s XDefiant – or rather, the people who made the recently-released game and, in doing so, followed management’s ill-advised edict to swipe a slice of pie from Call of Duty’s endlessly mashing maw. By many measures, the free-to-play shooter, which featured factions from a veritable rainbow of wrung-dry IPs like Far Cry, The Division, and Watch Dogs, was solid, a "perfect antidote to those tired of Call of Duty’s modern-day bloat," according to PC Gamer. But as we’ve seen time and time again, “solid” doesn’t convince millions of people to abandon habits and communities they’ve spent years building up in whichever game rules the roost.

“Solid,” at best, inspires brief curiosity, which is why executive producer Mark Rubin was today able to boast that “we broke internal records for the fastest game to surpass 5 million users and in the end we had over 15 million players play our game” while the Ubisoft mothership declared that it’s pulling the plug on the game, shutting down studios in San Francisco and Osaka, planning to “ramp down” another studio in Sydney, and potentially lay off hundreds of workers.

"Unfortunately, the discontinuation of XDefiant brings difficult consequences for the teams working on this game," Ubisoft chief studios and portfolio officer Marie-Sophie de Waubert wrote in a post on the company's official site. "Even if almost half of the XDefiant team worldwide will be transitioning to other roles within Ubisoft, this decision also leads to the closing of our San Francisco and Osaka production studios and to the ramp down of our Sydney production site, with 143 people departing in San Francisco and 134 people likely to depart in Osaka and Sydney. To those team members leaving Ubisoft, I want to express my deepest gratitude for your work and contributions. Please know that we are committed to supporting you during this transition."

This masterpiece in refusing to name the parties responsible – Where are the “difficult consequences for teams working on the game” coming from, de Waubert? Who is making these decisions? Certainly not the workers themselves – harks back to similarly grim ends met by Concord and Redfall, as well as unannounced games from companies like Blizzard and Sony that never even got the chance to launch and face off against their genre’s respective entrenched boogeymen.

The triple-A strategy of trying to muscle in on the turf of giants with just a brand portfolio and a dream, only to throw up your hands when you don’t strike gold after a few months, is a dead end. The Ubisofts of the world cannot keep doing this. And yet:

“Developing games-as-a-service experiences remains a pillar of our strategy,” wrote de Waubert, citing successful series like Rainbow Six, The Crew, and For Honor, the most recent of which began in 2017, all of which arguably tried to do something unique, and all of which were given actual time to find their footing. “It’s a highly competitive market, and we will apply the lessons learned with XDefiant to our future live titles.”

You got to love this. The Pentagon just failed its 7th audit in a row. It has a budget of $1tr. And yet the cost savings team decides that penny pinching by making life harder for workers is where the real savings are to be found. Not the giant black hole of finance which is the military industrial complex.

Nope they genuinely think that the only reason we're having these weather events is because there's NOT ENOUGH carbon in the atmosphere.

What's your bright spot today buddy?

Same. I got one after a trip to Japan. Life changing.

I appreciate this doesn't work for everyone and might not be a long term solution, but I dropped 20kg by fasting on a 20:4 schedule.

That had chattel slavery. Which suggests they didn't rely on a mechanised workforce.