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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Thank you. I did think about that also.

    ‘Volunteers’ did the counting, but surely they should have known or been informed that a quorum of votes equal to x% of the community are required for the vote to be valid. If the count doesn’t meet or exceed that value, discard the ballots.

    Or even why was the vote permitted to take place in less than the required notification period? I presume the answer to these questions is either incompetence or bravado on the part of the board members taking their position for granted.

    I find it unlikely that if the vote had went the other way, the board would have had the integrity to raise the same objections.


  • To play devil’s advocate for a moment, having a sufficient vote notification period is important.

    Though if that were the board’s true concern, they surely would have announced intention to notify the community alongside their statement cancelling the vote for this reason, which hasn’t happened insofar as I can tell.

    Voting details:

    According to recent census data, Goodyear has 2.7 people per household. It doesn’t say for the city specifically, but Arizona appears to have a minor population of 21%. I saw in the statement this association represents “over 1,000” households. In my experience, that could mean anywhere from 1,001 - 1,099 homes. The city of Goodyear held a vote earlier this year to approve a water utility contract, which lists an expected voter turnout of 17%.

    By this, I’m guessing less than 3,000 people live in this community, with about 2,400 eligible to vote on an association proposal, but likely around 400 people that would go to the effort of voting on such a tedious issue.

    I think that if half of the community shows up with less than a day’s notice to make themselves heard, that’s probably representative enough for how the community feels about these board members.





  • I agree about everything in your first point. I hadn’t previously considered that the novelty of a new technology would necessarily increase have disproportionately high initial cost.

    That said, I feel like any calculation of cost against how many hours played is entirely subjective. Your suggestion of $0.75 / entertainment hour is quite different than what I consider ideal. Games will vary genre to genre, person to person, platform to platform.

    A person with limited time might exclusively play shorter titles, or maybe just multiplayer titles. A person with significant free time might spent hundreds of hours replaying an RPG.

    To be incredibly broad, I would say that games shouldn’t cost more per entertainment hour than half of what any given person earns at their job - but even that is quite subjective and should be taken with salt.


  • You make a good point, and I agree. I wasn’t thinking that it was the only thing on the market and therefore the price is whatever a new technology costs.

    I tend to think of video games - being a form of entertainment - as a great way to be entertained while also being an incredibly low cost option for the amount of time I spend enjoying them.

    Buying a $600 console just to enjoy a single $60 title is an extreme example but to me, if that game provides 100 hours of playtime, that seems well worth it. Cheaper than going to a theatre or most other forms of entertainment.

    To be sure, I don’t do this, but I’ve always viewed gaming through a $/h lens, and could never understand why so many people saw it as a waste of time. That’s what I was thinking when I wrote that comment earlier - it seems to me that you get more playtime with some RPG from this decade than you would playing Pac-Man. Though perhaps I feel that way because games like Pac-Man don’t appeal to me.

    Thinking about it, your point might be valid again, with the Atari being a new technology, people were likely to sink far more hours into a title than they might do with modern games since we have so many to choose from now. I’ve never thought about it that way. Thanks for pointing this out.









  • Professor Santiago Gallino specializing in retail management was interviewed last year by NPR for a piece about these tags.

    While the labels give retailers the ability to increase prices suddenly, Gallino doubts companies like Walmart will take advantage of the technology in that way.

    “To be honest, I don’t think that’s the underlying main driver of this,” Gallino said. “These are companies that tend to have a long-term relationship with their customers and I think the risk of frustrating them could be too risky, so I would be surprised if they try to do that.”

    Rather than seeing an opportunity to use surge pricing, Gallino says retailers are likely drawn to electronic shelf tags to ensure consistency between online and in-store pricing.

    What a prophet.



  • Given the noise Musk has been making surrounding the political landscape in Germany, the United Kingdom, and lately Canada, it stands to reason that the richest person on the planet is actively trying to make the world revolve around him.

    Sentiment similar to yours was undoubtedly stated a century ago throughout Europe; ‘You overestimate the impact Germany has on the citizenry outside of it.’ Look where that attitude got the world, and here you are saying the same thing.



  • Certainly not an expert in the field here, but I’m not sure there’s much environmental benefit from laundry bags of that sort, given the collected microplastics optimistically end up - Germany excluded - collated in your local landfill.

    Guppyfriend even recommends sealing them in a container for disposal to ensure they don’t blow around during waste collection and transport. This assumes of course that you can successfully transfer microplastic fibres from a large bag into a small container without spillage, but that’s a matter separate from my conjecture.

    Guppyfriend's FAQ

    Source

    While I don’t think any particular company that makes similar bags is purposefully guilty of this, the marketing strategy used to promote these as environmentally responsible products just smells like greenwashing to me.

    The ones I’ve had are also made of synthetic materials, and so eventually break down and begin releasing their own fibres.

    Frankly, the true environmental benefit I see is something I’ve never seen advertised: I can wash groups clothes I want kept from intermingling in the same load and therefore run the machine half as often.