As does Ring, Flock, Samsung, Apple, Google and so on. Some random person with any other hidden camera can easily upload them to creepy servers and do automatic face recognition on them too.

Steve Mann https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Mann_(inventor) has been doing that for a long time.

They can produce better video than some cameras but not as good as others. 12MP ultrawide is pretty standard on security cameras and they’re already all over the place.

Do you think that the current smart glasses are making surveillance more normalized or do you think that they’re getting more common because we’ve already normalized constant surveillance?

I’d point out that the PATRIOT act passed a quarter century ago with only one “No” and one abstention.

If I understand your response correctly, you’re arguing that the glasses themselves aren’t the issue, it’s the shifts that come with accepting the glasses.

They may ironically have the reverse effect. I guarantee that corporations are already cataloging your facial expressions. Between Ring, Flock, Apple, Google, Netflix, Samsung, etc. there are many pictures of all our faces with rich annotation. Currently most people don’t even think about how thoroughly they’re being watched. These douchy glasses may actually draw attention to the matter.

I dislike Facebook and deleted my account even before they changed to “Meta”. I also value privacy.

But what privacy violations do “smart glasses” provide that weren’t already trivially available? Tiny cameras are insanely cheap. A reasonably handy person could hide several on their person and there are plenty of “spy shops” that sell actual wearable hidden cameras.

The “I love ICE” kid was wearing Meta Ray Bans but the first video I saw of it was from someone else’ camera. I can’t leave the house without getting filmed from multiple angles. The only thing those glasses do is make it really obvious that the wearer is a dumbass.

Talarivo and Crockett both seem like good candidates at first glance.

Neither should be censored.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_China

I’ve actually seen them myself so convincing me otherwise will be a tall order. You’d be better off trying to argue that elections in China are less fair than they are here. That’s feasible but your argument would need to address a whole host of systemic electoral problems in the US.

It’s not just vibes.

So you do have evidence. Excellent. Can we see it?

Should I read your evasive answer as an indiction that you’re opinions are based on something other than evidence?

OK. How are you measuring the ability to criticize your own government? Is there any metric, besides gut intuition, about criticisms you can make here that you can’t make there?

If we ever become a full on totalitarian dystopia like China, it’s over.

What evidence would convince you that this has happened?

I ask because we seem to have blown far past China in every form of human rights violation that China would have to work hard to become as much of a totalitarian dystopia.

I’ve been to China. I’ve watched porn without a VPN and no one cared. From my experience, the tales of Chinese dystopia are more than a little exaggerated.

https://youtu.be/c_ANImMrYu4?t=197

The current stance of the president of the Heritage Foundation seems to be that if the left does not take up arms, MAGA will take over everything, permanently.

There’s simple and there’s oversimplified. The element your missing is “trust”. The reason gamers go to Steam is because we trust their reviews and return policies.

The other storefronts haven’t built that trust. Most gamers have the experience of trying other storefronts, hating them, and going back to Steam.

People don’t trust Gabe because he’s a billionaire, they trust him because he consistently makes decisions that gamers benefit from. No other game store CEO can claim that with a straight face.

That would be how monopolies work. You realize that Steam doesn’t require exclusivity, right? You can get BG3 all over the place. When customers have choice between vendors it’s not a monopoly, even if they tend to make the same choice.

Do you think Larian’s management is also stupid?

Any halfway decent GTM executive would have checked their distribution channel options and chosen the mix that makes them the most money, net of fees.

Why would they pay for a service that harms them?

Are you actually confused about the information asymmetry in video game purchases? Given your weird movie references I assumed you were just trying to change the topic.

I’ll try to use small words. Before you play a game, you don’t know if it’s goo;, just as used car buyers don’t know if the used car is a lemon. Without a buyer protections that drags the price of good games down just as lemons drag down the price of used cars. Akerlof goes into the proof for the car part of this in his paper.

“Lemon laws” mostly solve that problem for cars. Steam mostly solves that problem for video games. That requires trust. You may not trust Steam but millions of people do. They’ve repeatedly made decisions that benefit gamers so gamers flock to them. Thats why they buy so many games from Steam even when they’re available elsewhere. If they broke that trust they’d probably never get it back but, until then, their net effect is to increase revenue for studios by providing a market where people are comfortable enough to spend more money.

So you don’t care that Larian isn’t harmed, you don’t care that the dev’s aren’t harmed, you don’t care that the consumer isn’t harmed.

You just feel bad for Epic?

You’re the one claiming to be the economics expert. I’m simply correcting the record.

I haven’t studied “capitalism” but my Masters degree is in Financial Engineering. Since you seem to care about formal economics, how do you propose solving Akelof’s Market for Lemons?

Valve solves the information asymmetry. That’s a net gain for both buyers and sellers. But you’ve studied economics, so you probably know that already.

So let’s skip to the meat of the question. How do you propose determining the intrinsic value of resolved information asymmetry.

You seem to be operating under some notion that particular work deserves a particular amount of pay. That’s backwards. People pay for what they get, not for what the seller’s cost of goods.

We know that Larian is doing very well financially. Their devs are happy and well paid.

That’s a completely irrelevant number.

I have no idea how many devs worked on BG3 and that number has 0 impact on my enjoyment of the game. Given the number of hours I spent playing BG3, the price made it one of the cheapest forms of entertainment available.

And, as a developer, I really don’t care how much companies pay to marketing vendors. Developer pay is generally negotiated when you’re hired. I haven’t worked in B2C but, as I understand it, they usually pay bonuses on sales volume rather than profits.