Golub87

Mods threatening me with ban over my "negative attitude". Same mods who have endorsed WH+ as a group. Guess it is a great product after all. I mean they can't ALL be wrong, right. Good bye, I guess I will not survive this injection of toxic positivity.

As for the whole "no digital" thing - I love all the dancing around the bush and not naming the elephant in the room as much as the next guy, but the reason why GW is cutting on it is simple - it is easier to pirate. Infinitely easier. And like all anti-piracy measures, it ends up being an anti-consumer measure that can even cost the company. It is even an anti-environment measure that is also very unfriendly to people with disabilities as we have seen on previous threads. GW has a significant market of people who are invested in the product via mixture of emotional link to the stuff you own (since you build and customize your army yourself, thus having a fruit of your own labor that is uniquely NOT alienated from you) and sunk cost fallacy. Why should they give you anything for free, when they can extract that little bit of extra wealth? What will you do? Stop? You are hooked, too deep in. It is easier to buy the next rule book, than throw away all those hours of work and all that money invested in the hobby. Naturally, this kind of mindset is very sensitive to bumps that risk to dislodge it, hence the often seen reaction to any kind of criticism leveled at GW or the game. A significant number of people NEED this game to be the best there is and GW to be a stand up people who do not pull shady stuff. Ironically enough, it is these people that actually make sure that GW can get away with bad rules and hostile behavior.

Wait, we get the privilege of watching the advertisements disguised as mediocre content AND we get to support the poor shareholders by paying for it AND we get access to all the content we had access to for free (but worse)?!? Where do I sign up?

If you are referring to something along the lines of USSR, it was one of the finest projects in human history and a true milestone in our development as a species. Please don't @ me with whatever propaganda you heard about it, I heard it all before, it holds no merit and this is not the place. As for extremism, it is but a positional description. Go mere 200 years in the past and liberal bourgeois advocating for parliamentary republics are dangerous blood-drenched extremists that want to destroy all that is good and holy in the world but they will never succeed because of human natu... I mean the divine right of kings.

First of all I am glad that you feel like you have all that you need. That is genuinely great. Second of all being rich is not "good". Being rich means having innocent blood on your hands, directly or indirectly. No one should strive to be rich. Rich people should not exist. Now to answer your question: in order to not be poor you need to be the owner of capital that is capable of producing more capital. That is the dividing line between the rich and the poor.

The definitions of what constitutes poverty are arbitrary and established by institutions that are vested in the system and the perpetuation of the liberal myth. I mean it is funny that you accuse someone of using the term to serve their own ideology and then do not call out liberals for doing the same.

No, because you have acquired (what us, working class Joes consider to be) trappings of wealth. Being able to spend money on an impulse FEELS like you have more because if you did not, then you would not spend it like that right? Would I, as a rational individual, spend more than I can afford on a whim? Of course not, therefore the fact that I am spending it means that I am less poor. Human psyche is weird.

No, poverty wage is exactly that - wage that is, on it's own, not enough to provide even a decent, so called middle class, living circumstance to an individual. It is an indictment of the system, not of the person.

Yes. Working class turns to consumerism in order to fill the gap that alienation from our own labor leaves in our psyche. It also makes us feel less poor. Our beloved capitalist overlords are more than happy to oblige and feed the addiction to various toys. Being rich does not mean being able to afford a new car or a new phone. Thinking like that just shows how removed we are from the actual material reality of being rich.

There absolutely is such a thing as a poverty wage. And it is not a discriminatory term, unless you consider poverty to be a personal failing of the afflicted individual.

Sigma arises from the idea that something was done wrong. That an individual did something to deserve such a fate. In this case the idea that lack of funds is not a failing of an individual but by a system, goes directly against central tenets of liberal ideology - those that espouse free market, personal enterprise and meritocracy. That is unacceptable in any ideological framework, including the liberal one, therefore the afflicted must be a sinner. Now this in turn creates coping mechanisms. 99.9% of the population is poor. People don't like to think of themselves as the sinners, yet they are immersed in this liberal cultural hegemony. The solution is the myth of the so called "middle class". And most people react very defensively when you touch their coping mechanisms, especially if they are deeply ingrained cultural ones. Under capitalism, unless you can employ your capital to acquire more capital, you are poor. If you are forced to sell your labor to live, you are poor. Working class is poor. There exists a labor aristocracy, of course, a small number of specialists that can eke out a comfortable existence for themselves, but vast majority of us, including everyone here I guess, are poor. And that is not a failing to be ashamed of, but a reality that needs to be processed.

People being insulted at the fact that they are underpaid just shows how deep have we sunk in the cultural hegemony of liberalism. In liberal worldview being poor is a sin, therefore suggesting that someone is poor is akin to accusing them of being a sinner. People get offended at the suggestion that they are not getting their fair cut because the blessed invisible hand gives out exactly as much as everyone deserves, no more and no less.

This is a rather idealistic outlook. We live in a material universe and material conditions shape the way people act and who floats to the top. There is a reason why rich people and corporate executives consistently show traits of psychopathy and narcissism higher then the general population. When the "game" is set up in a way to favor certain traits, those traits will show up more consistently and frequently than others. Turning up the heat is the best way to make sure that corpos think twice about their practices because it provides incentive to be different. That said, GW failing would be only good for this industry and the community even within this capitalist reality.

Of course, but focusing on shaming GW in this particular instance is warranted. "Everybody does it" is not a zinger people think it is.

Let's say you like miniatures and painting and want to do wargaming as well. You go to your local place where likeminded folks are congregating and you find 10 people that are all playing GW games. You have a choice - you can essentially bet $500-600 on a different game, hoping that someone will like it enough to bet that much money themselves in the hope that there will be a community OR you can put that money on a sure bet that you will have people to play with. This is not always the case - larger cities usually have a number of clubs, with variety of games represented, but GW has cornered the market and even in the most diverse of gaming communities, GW games will get you the most people to play with because of this inertia - you need people to play with, so you will join the largest group, thus making it even larger, perpetuating the cycle. How to handle this "support"? If I feel the need for any GW models in my life, I take care to make sure that my money does not end up in their pockets. Buying second hand works great for that and is significantly cheaper, third party manufacturers are also an option. Elf is an elf and dwarf is a dwarf after all. As for Squidmar tangent - yes, GW are the leeches in this case. Squidmar does benefit from making the videos, sure. But it takes skill, dedication. It is labor. It creates value for the viewer. Unlike the corporate shareholders who get money for not doing anything. Yes, he uses GW products, but he paid for those (and paid a lot, let's not pretend that GW margin is not insane). Also, circling back to GW cornering the market - it is not like he has a choice in what space will he operate as painting guy. By virtue of controlling such a share of the market, GW forces painters to operate on their territory.