Sunday 31 March 2019

Backstabbed by the Business

When you're part of something, and then someone in that group, changes the rules on you, or makes things uncomfortable for you, you feel anger, betrayal, disgust. If its a project leader, and they can justify this, you might feel less of it, but its still there, but when a company, treats customers like cash cows, after they have been tried and true to your product, you are left feeling helpless.

The Problem at the end of the day, is, we have little to no power. We are nothing more than cattle, coming to the trough, unable to affect major businesses.

What am I talking about, and in what context..

What I'm Talking About:

When I lived in Russia, Moscow specifically, you had a large range of restaurants you could visit. You could walk to something locally, and have 2-4 choices, but since the Metro was closer, you could ride the metro 2-3 stops and improve your choices by 10x. 4-5 stops and you had another 30-40 choices. Since the Metro was travelling 100km an hour underground, you could cross the city from top to bottom in 40 minutes, and could choose, on one line, from more than a thousand locations.

To put that in perspective, In my home city, If I travel for 40 minutes, I could drive to the city for a choice of 100 places, and search the northern suburbs for another 100. My home city has 3600 places to eat, Moscow, over 20,000.

So?

So, Adelaide, and Moscow (inside the metro limits) are approximately the same in size, yet little Adelaide has a little under a million, and Moscow in the vicinity of 15 million.

The point is, in Moscow, that each restaurant has, within a 5km radius, more people that it can cope with, for a year of being open. It has no need to cater to the whim of every customer. It can't. The prices of those places are exorbitant. The Average Cafe served eggs on toast with a coffee for 500 rubles, at the time, 2009, $15. Not bad for 2019, if its a good restaurant, in a western culture, with people earning 30 an hour. But Moscow, 2009, 500 rubles was double the hourly wage of an office worker. So you'd only went to cafes on dates, (or so I thought).

Yet, due to demand, the cafes were packed, they put in more chairs than were legally allowed, paid off the inspectors to turn a blind eye, and raised their prices another 20%, and they still were packed.

In Moscow, 2008-2010, You could open a restaurant, without training staff, over charging, ignore all the rules of , well anything, and you'd still be fully booked for a year.

I was regularly sitting in a place, waiting staff nowhere to be seen, food was average, paying twice what I should, surrounded by people, wondering how such a place stayed in business, surely all these people would tell their friends how sh*te it was, and the place would be empty in a month? nope.. the social power of all those people would be barely 1%, and even then, half would still go there just to see if it was as poor as their friends made it out to be..

Bad Publicity is still publicity.

So, to my context?

In The world of Board games, we are under a glut of games, Kickstarter has provided anyone the opportunity to bring their ideas to the world. These games come out, they bring fun, sometimes, they bring opportunity, and its all packaged in what seems to be a great deal... til it turns out you were just being brought to the trough, fattened up for the slaughter, and if you complain about it, if you realise you are being duped and raise your voice and squeal, you're quickly kicked out.

For every unhappy customer, there are a hundred customers who have yet to take off the rose coloured glasses.

Here is a list of games, where the creator & publisher have screwed over their Kickstarter Backers


That there is $1000 difference. Anyone who has bought 24 games in the last 2-3 years on kickstarter, spending $2100 on games, to find out if they'd just stuck the money in the bank 3 years ago, and when the game came out on special, bought it now, and banked $1200 ($100 savings + $200 minimum interest) would be mighty pissed.

There are arguments, they would have been playing the game all this time.. well no, most of these games only came out a year ago, or less. Even if they played each game, played twice a week, in rotation, they may have not yet, at this point in time, played more than twice some of these games.

The Argument that the game would not have been published without them, yes, and that's the point. the KS backers are the reason why the game exists. The publisher should be rewarding their backers, ensuring their backers have a reason to back it, other than just getting a copy. (which as often as not, they don't, or its poor, or its broken, missing bits, damaged, rules are poorly written, etc etc).

Backing games, is somewhat a lottery. You don't always get great games, you don't always get anything, but you're in it to win it, you back 20 games, one will never come, 2 will arrive with downgraded quality goods, 2 will have strange rulebooks that don't make sense, but 3 will be great games that you want to play every weekend, and 1 will be an awesome game that always comes out to be played.

Just now, you could have waited til everyone said how great those top 4 games were, bought them at 50% sale, and not even bought all those other duds, and gone on holiday with your awesome game, and played with friends on the beach.

The Capitalism, the Commercialism, has infected the creative industry, again, and Its sickening. again. 
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Wednesday 20 March 2019

Sad State of Affairs

There was once a golden age, its time has come and gone, and the worst part is, those of us who grew up in that age, remember it. As time goes by, and things become less golden, the sheen wears off, it peels back to reveal maybe layers of lead, we start to fight, but its often too late.

At some point in time, we worked from 8 to death, we gathered food, tilled soil, fed animals, built our own farms, attended festivals, met friends, made enemies, had no expenses to deal with, just the gnawing stomach when times were lean and the fear of lean times when times were plentiful.

Then we left the farms, put on shirts, studied in school from 5 to 12, got city jobs to pay for food, and realised we had whole afternoons, lit with candles to entertain ourselves. Musical Instruments? Local friends? maybe some home-still juice? everything we needed.

But Winters were still cold, they needed wood from the forests delivered, or gas piped into the house. This cost money, so incomes needed to increase, so jobs needed higher pays, but through badly managed economies, we needed the elderly to leave work to allow young people to start, else they'd be unemployable, so now the retirement age came in.

Then we started to create entertainment, and whole industries of entertainment, but we needed money for entertainment, this meant more studies, so we went to school from 4 to 21, to get better paid jobs, but we needed electricity for entertainment, so we needed to create bigger plants, more power, more logistics, more grids, more networks, til now, its all one big network, called the Internet.

So, we're all entertained, so much so, that we don't have time for anything else, we're all connected, so much we don't want to connect.

Its like when I traveled overseas for years and years, I was not here, so when I visited, everyone wanted to see me, talk to me, visit me, because I was not available, but when I moved back here, 'we'll catch up' can mean not seeing friends for years and years, yet they live a stones throw away.

A Lack of something, creates desire for something.

Now, things have gone past this spectrum, we've passed through the eye of the storm, and things are taking a turn for the worst. instead of making lives better for everyone, we're reverting back to the old ways.

Old people, need to work longer to pay the bills, so they push for older retirement limits, this often provides governments with more income as unretired 60+yr olds are usually on the higher spectrum of incomes = more taxes. So the age of retirement creeps from 60, to 65, to 70.

Soon enough people will be working while in school, but because they're doing it all part time, they'll be in school longer, til 30 or worse.

They'll be unable to earn enough to start saving enough to create a nest, let alone a nest egg, so they won't be able to retire, as the prices of house climbs up and up beyond the means of any 30-40yr old.

The price of schools, education, healthcare, medical aid, living, gas, electricity, banking fees, transfer fees, it'll all go pear shaped as the cost to live will outdo the cost to die. the middle class will be squeezed, having children will be so expensive, only the top 1% will be able to put their kids through schools, the rest will go back to working menial jobs, curating videos or likes on entertainment social media for pittance, just to afford food, while living in sweat boxes.. better than outside in the cold.

The poor will be trapped in the never ending cycle of economical slavery, the middle class struggling to make do, with the rare few rising from the pile to greatness, giving hope to the rest, but its all part of the system in place to ensure the mass middle class don't rise up to topple the system. The few elite might cease to exist, as they slowly but surely put all the decisions into the hands of AI, too fast to be unplugged, the elite slip back down into the system themselves, unable to stop any changes.

Just like those babyboomers, realising now that they messed up so much, they're unable to make any changes, the system is a runaway train. The young are too engrossed in their mobile entertainment wallets to notice the chains being clamped around their feet.

How to escape? and where to escape to? remote forests? back to nature? I don't want to escape all of it, just the part where bills became more dominant than income, where people paid for entertainment, than make their own with their voices, their instruments, their hands and their minds.

The Goal?

I'd prefer a future where electricity is free, solar panels and watermills take care of it all. People work 20 hour weeks, study 10 more all their lives, can afford to buy a place to live by the time they are 30, so they can devote the next 20 years to something bigger than mortgages, bigger than themselves, 'Sundays' are forced offline, enjoy a full day off where shops and offices and banks and everything is shut, and TV is off and people have no choice but to get outdoors and just be.

Can we work towards that? please?
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