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Cake day: April 5th, 2024

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  • An ex-Sony exec said laid-off employees should ‘go to the beach for a year’ or ‘drive an Uber’ Lian Kit Wee Sep 11, 2024, 7:15 AM MESZ

    Chris Deering Sony Former Sony Entertainment president, Chris Deering, told recently laid-off employees to take a break for a year and wait for opportunities to return. Reuters

    Ex-Sony Entertainment president Chris Deering said laid-off employees should take time off. Deering said that he doesn’t believe the recent Sony layoffs result from corporate greed. In February, Sony said it would lay off 900 employees from its PlayStation division.

    Former Sony Computer Entertainment Europe president Chris Deering has a blunt message for recently laid-off game developers: They should “go to the beach for a year” or “drive an Uber” until the job market improves.

    Deering, who led Sony’s European PlayStation division during the launch of the iconic game console and its successor, PlayStation 2, acknowledged the pain of Sony’s recent cuts.

    The company said in February it would lay off about 900 people globally and close PlayStation Studios’ London studio, amid a slowing gaming market. Deering dismissed the notion that the layoffs were purely driven by corporate motives.

    “I don’t think it’s fair to say that the resulting layoffs have been greed,” Deering said on journalist Simon Parkin’s “My Perfect Console” podcast. "I always tried to minimize the speed in which we added staff because I always knew there would be a cycle.

    Fluctuations in consumer spending and recent games’ diminishing sales impact the company’s ability to “justify spending the money for the next game,” making some staffing cuts inevitable, said Deering.

    Deering offered some unconventional advice for game developers affected by the layoffs. He suggested workers take time off or find temporary work, like driving for Uber, while the industry stabilizes.

    “It’s like the pandemic,” Deering told Parkin. “You’re going to have to figure out how to get through it, drive an Uber, or whatever. Find a cheap place to live and go to the beach for a year.”

    His remarks come at a time when layoffs have hit the gaming industry hard.

    Other game developers, including Microsoft and Unity, have similarly downsized their studios this year, cutting over 3,000 jobs at the start of the year, BI reported in February.

    This series of layoffs in the game industry stemmed from slumping game sales and a shrinking gaming demographic, BI previously reported. Revenue from video game sales in the US in 2023 fell by 2.3% from the previous year, and the average time spent gaming fell from 16.5 hours to 13 hours from 2021 to 2022. Related stories

    However, Deering seemed optimistic about the prospects for game developers. He told Parkin that laid-off workers should take advantage of the time off to recharge but keep an eye out for any opportunities to return to the industry.

    Game development skill is not going to “be a lifetime of poverty or limitation. It’s still where the action is,” said Deering.

    Deering is currently an advisor for Cudo Ventures, a company specializing in monetization applications.

    Sony Interactive Entertainment and Deering did not respond to a request for comment from BI sent outside business hours.










  • At that age they have no understanding what “dead” means. We do not know if the child kept quiet or if just no one took his ramblings seriously and kids that young often have no words for what happened especially if it is dramatic, the kid might have made drawings instead that went unnoticed. We also do not know if the gun owner threatened the child to stay quiet.

    Please let people who know children and their mental capabilities and have experience in treating them as is needed do their job and stay away from making such brutal assumptions. It is ok to not know things, that’s why specialists exist. It is not about “believing” when it comes to a decision of life or death, feelings need to stay back. It is ok to find a child murdering someone disturbing without following a gut feeling for what should be done.






  • What a shit guy who cares more about people who live in thousands of years than people who live today:

    https://netzpolitik.org/2023/longtermism-an-odd-and-peculiar-ideology/

    https://aeon.co/essays/why-longtermism-is-the-worlds-most-dangerous-secular-credo

    Why do I think this ideology is so dangerous? The short answer is that elevating the fulfilment of humanity’s supposed potential above all else could nontrivially increase the probability that actual people – those alive today and in the near future – suffer extreme harms, even death. Consider that, as I noted elsewhere, the longtermist ideology inclines its adherents to take an insouciant attitude towards climate change. Why? Because even if climate change causes island nations to disappear, triggers mass migrations and kills millions of people, it probably isn’t going to compromise our longterm potential over the coming trillions of years. If one takes a cosmic view of the situation, even a climate catastrophe that cuts the human population by 75 per cent for the next two millennia will, in the grand scheme of things, be nothing more than a small blip – the equivalent of a 90-year-old man having stubbed his toe when he was two.

    Bostrom’s argument is that ‘a non-existential disaster causing the breakdown of global civilisation is, from the perspective of humanity as a whole, a potentially recoverable setback.’ It might be ‘a giant massacre for man’, he adds, but so long as humanity bounces back to fulfil its potential, it will ultimately register as little more than ‘a small misstep for mankind’. Elsewhere, he writes that the worst natural disasters and devastating atrocities in history become almost imperceptible trivialities when seen from this grand perspective. Referring to the two world wars, AIDS and the Chernobyl nuclear accident, he declares that ‘tragic as such events are to the people immediately affected, in the big picture of things … even the worst of these catastrophes are mere ripples on the surface of the great sea of life.’

    This way of seeing the world, of assessing the badness of AIDS and the Holocaust, implies that future disasters of the same (non-existential) scope and intensity should also be categorised as ‘mere ripples’. If they don’t pose a direct existential risk, then we ought not to worry much about them, however tragic they might be to individuals. As Bostrom wrote in 2003, ‘priority number one, two, three and four should … be to reduce existential risk.’ He reiterated this several years later in arguing that we mustn’t ‘fritter … away’ our finite resources on ‘feel-good projects of suboptimal efficacy’ such as alleviating global poverty and reducing animal suffering, since neither threatens our longterm potential, and our longterm potential is what really matters.

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

    He does not care about us, why should anyone care about him? Unfortunately other rich people are also into this, because it helps them to ignore the worlds problems and to do whatever they want to the people living now.