Sorta.

The legislation that applies to physical copies of copyrighted materials is different and comes from the time when the only physical copies of copyrighted materials were paper books.

Whilst strictly speaking you are buying a license for both, for physical media it’s quite a different format of license with quite different conditions than for digital media.

The physical media license is implicit, standardized (the same no matter where you buy the media, the publisher or even the game) and associated with the media (i.e. ownership of the media means having the license) which means that it’s transferable without requiring a 3rd party intermediary (transfering ownership of the physical media means transfering the license that is associated with it).

Digital games licenses, on the other hand, are not standardized and vary from store to store, publisher to publisher and/or even game to game (the usual is to have to accept the terms the store presents you, which are not at all an industry standard set of contract terms, much less a legal standard, and to properly judge them one would require legal help). They’re all very explicitly personal (associated with the buyer) and them having or not any of the buyer rights one has in the implicit license of the physical media, is a crapshoot (generally each store has it’s own unique licensing agreements, with sometimes unique elements for certain publishers or games). Most notably, it’s very rare for them to be transmissible (it hugelly depends on the store) and even then it requires a 3rd party to approve it (generally the store). As far as I know, there is no consumer license for games digital media which has the same or more rights for the consumer than the implicity license for physical media and only commercial licenses (which cost thousands of dollars) will give you more rights than that.

Things like EULAs are pseudo-legal attempts at circunventing the implicit license of physical media, which is why they’re not valid in most countries (they’re deemed a one-sided attempts at forcing a change of the implicit contract terms of the sale, after the sale has been concluded, and hence have explicitly been judged as having no contractual force whenever those things went to court in most of the World).

The abuse of autoritative sources (not to be confused with “authoritarian”) positions for personal upside maximization (which often meant spreading propaganda) and subsequent fall in trust in authoritative sources long predates Trump.

I mean, in the US, Newspapers - which are supposed to inform people, not to convince them of anything - openly gloat about their “opinion making” and are criticized if they do not openly support a candidate in Presidential Elections (the very opposite of Journalism)

Then there’s the decades-long massive abuse of “expert sources” on Finance and Economics by Neoliberalism to push very specific narratives, for very specific political ends which overwhelmingly benefited a very specific subset of people.

What you’re seeing now is the product of the deceit practiced by many of those who are supposed to be independent experts who inform the rest on important subject, and the blanked distrust on the the Media and “experts” and subsequent blooming of shameless loudmouth liars who speak with maximum confidence in politics is really just the harvesting that which has been sowed since at least the 80s.

IMHO the tipping point was decades ago and what you see now is the acceleration downhill having been going for long enough that the speed of travel downwards has become scary.

Having lived, worked and driven in lots of places in Europe, in my experience the frequency of that happenning depends on the country.

Also, everywhere in Europe it’s against the Driving Code to not drive at a safe distance from the vehicle in front of you, so you can get fined for it and will definitelly be found responsible on a collision with the vehicle in front of you.

That said, I’m not surprised that you see more of it in Belgium. You’ll also see more of it in Southern European countries.

Yeah, that stuff it’s pretty hard to learn and it’s worse when you’ve never worked in an environment where people in general tend to practice good time management - a lot of things you would normally not risk doing because they look like time wasting turn out to be the key to saving time, avoid wasted work (i.e. time wasted) and avoid problems later (which in turn, also means time when you’re the one who has to fix them), but only after you’ve seen it in action can you know for sure that such things will in overall save you time (and can actually justify spending time doing them to others because you’ve seen them actually work).

I was lucky that after 2 years working, having chosen to leave my country I ended up in The Netherlands, and the Dutch are very good at working in an efficient and organized way that properly respects work-life balance, so I learned a lot from them and watching and learning how they worked and what resulted of working that way gave me a whole new perspective into the work practices from my first job which I until then though were “the way everybody works in this area”.

No idea. I learned it from a manager who went into a management course, was taught it and not even a week later was back in full reactive mode treating any new thing coming in as Urgent Important even when non-urgent or at least non-important, as she had been doing before going to that course.

Let’s just say she was a lousy manager.

Well, as joel_feila pointed out, people tend to be forced to, at the very least, work in the Urgent and Important quadrant because that’s what one has to give top priority to, no matter what (and part of the work of triaging the demands on one’s time is to make sure one doesn’t miss or delay things from that quadrant because of too many Non Important stuff interrupting one’s work).

However you want to try and get yourself in a situation were Non-Urgent Important stuff is what you do most, because amongst other things by tacking potential problems in Important domains before they become Urgent, you have a lot more space to do it properly, something which in turn avoids further problems due to one’s half-arsed solutions for Urgent not working anymore of breaking easilly when touched.

In summary, Non-Urgent Important is the ideal, Urgent Important is what gets top priority, Non-Important is what you do when there’s nothing in the other 2 quadrants to do.

The whole point of triaging incoming demands and doing all you can to subtly train the people upstream who are already informed of the importance and urgency of something to only get it to you in a way that interrupts your work if those things are indeed urgent, is exactly to create and maintain the space that lets you address most things in the Non-Urgent Important quadrant before they transit into the Urgent Important one.

If you don’t have “thinking things through” and “maintenance/tweaking” time you’re going to get a lot more fires and a lot more of the fires which start small grow into full-blown fires before you spot them, all of which just turns into a feedback cycle were all that urgent firefighting means you don’t have time for preparation, prevention and detection, which in turn creates more fires and more small fires growing hence you have to spend more time in urgent firefighting.

To be honest, in my entire career I have never managed to, in a specific job, pull out from a “constant urgent firefighting mode” to a “mostly steady mode of work with an urgent fire having to be fought once in a while”: making it happen has always been a case of me starting a new job and bringing in best practices from the start, so that by the time I’m finished with learning the environment, and integrating with a new team, and am working full speed, I’m keeping things under control. Doing it from the start of a new job is often possible because in my area (Software Engineering) people aren’t expected to hit the ground running at full speed (since you have to learn the installed codebase and integrate with the team) so there’s a lot of leway when starting a new job which you can use to set expectations from the start and to justify the extra time it takes to actually get a decent work process in place.

As I’ve written somewhere else, I’ve actually managed to bring over and use the Dutch style of working in a British Finance environment (which is hectic and prone to shoot-from-the-hip management and firefighting) to yield better results (faster and more predicable deliveries, were the work I made was better matched to user needs and had fewer bugs) than most of my colleagues and did all this working 8h/day rather than the 10h+/day they did.

IMHO, the process works, and I believe that’s the merit of the process rather than being a “me” thing.

From what I’ve observed when living in the UK and now that I’m living in Portugal, it’s shit management practices all the way up, with the politicians at the top being the worst managers of the lot.

But yeah, I can empathise with being in an work place were no matter what you do to try and manage your time to deliver your best (as the years went by in my career, I’ve learned various professional occupations which are are part of the “feed-in” for the main work I do, to quite an advanced level, merely as a means to improve my performance at delivering the right results at the right time, which is taking efficiency improving to quiet an extreme level), it just feels that all levels all the way up are working against you and that you’re just rowing against the current all the time.

Fortunatelly for me, I can just change employers and even countries if I think the overall work conditions are shit and I will never be able to properly manage my time, though I’ve noticed that plenty of medical professionals can’t, plus in my experience, when you’re snowed in by out of control inflows of work, you don’t generally have the energy to even start planning your way out of it.

That said, having moved from The Netherlands (whose management and work culture is generally very good) and into Finance in the UK (which is a pretty hectic and ill organised “shoot from the hip” environment), it’s perfectly possible to apply the techniques of highly organised and well managed environments in disorganised ones to produce superior results (in speed, quality and predictability of delivery timings) to those of everybody else there.

That said, I’m talking about Software Engineering here, which is a Logic+Creative area were you can “backup your patient” before you do something in case you make a mistake, unlike Medicine (though in Finance things can get “interesting” - read millions of dollars can be lost - if your code starts getting used by Traders and it’s not working properly). On the other hand one would expect that in Medicine, being properly rested in order to reduce the risk of mistakes is even more important.

I did that when I started (I am, modesty on the side, a natural at what I do for work) and the result was that I became the top problem-solver of my team and over time I had more and more load from people bringing me their problems whilst still being expected to do the formally allocated work, with the end result that when I left that job I was working very long hours, always tired and my productivity had plummeted.

What was happenning there was that, because of me always saying “yes, I’ll help you” with zero pushback, I became the easiest path for people in my team to quickly solve their problems, and that was including problems they could solve themselves. Also my effectiveness at doing anything fell massivelly because whatever I was doing, in the middle of it I would be interrupted (which has quite the cognitive cost due to interruption of the mental state of Flow and “mental context switching”) and if I immediatelly went into solving that new problem I would likely be interrupted at that too (leading to multiple things hanging half-way to done and making my delivery speed overall worse), and even if I wasn’t interrupted serving the latest interruption the mere “stop this task, do something else equally complex, then get back to the original task” increased the probability of mistakes in the original task because of the possibility of losing track of important details of the work I was doing in it.

Human beings are naturally lazy (myself included) and if, because you offer no pushback, coming to you with any problem is easier and faster than trying to figure it out themselves, people will tend come to you with their problems before properly after little or no effort to solve it themselves, which might be doable (though not good for them or for you) if it’s only one or two people, but not when it’s more than that.

If only to avoid becoming the minimum-effort-path for everybody else and/or having your efficiency drop because of not enough single-task focus and too much context switching (and the entire team’s efficiency fall compared to them solving all the problem they can solve themselves), you have to do some pushing back.

You aren’t hired to do the work of others and neither are you hired to underperform because you’re in constant firefighting mode even for things which are unimportant or not really burning, so immediate response to any demand on your time from somebody else is pretty much the most amateurish, least professional way to do your work for anybody which is not a junior-level professional.

That said, if you’re lucky enough to be in a situation were you empowering others to work better is recognized and desired or, even better, you’re expected to and have officially time to be a mentor, then you can relax the pushing back: you still should triage the urgency of your response to things to match their actual urgency - that’s just basic competence at organising your time and work - but you can now when approached by somebody with a problem dedicate some time to teach people to help themselves (literally have them sit down and explain how to diagnose and fix it whilst they do it themselves) both so that they don’t constantly come you with simple problems (which isn’t really the value added stuff you’re being paid a Senior level professional cost to do) and for them to grow as professionals, and if you’re mentoring you’ll want to go further and periodically sit with the junior types and do overviews of things or help them out in planning how to tackle a complex thing they’re about to start.

Still, in all this, you have to plan your time and triage access to you time based on urgency and importance in order to mantain good performance and actually deliver results in a predictable way, So as to best fits the needs of your employer: for any employee beyond junior level, good time management (which includes the priority of your response to queries and problems match the importance and real urgence of them) is just simple professional competence and since the triaging itself is a time cost (quite a big one if it breaks you out of Flow and forces a mental context switch), you want it done in the most effective way as possible and by the more well informed about the important and urgency of the situation as possible, which means most of it should be done upstream and before getting to you.

Well, I’m sorry for you guys to have to work under the worst of American management culture (the baseline of which, compared to Northern Europe and Scandinavia, is pretty bad).

Coming from a Southern Europe country and having worked in a couple of countries including Northern European ones, it’s my experience that a lot of those abusive work practices you see in Anglo-Saxon and Southern European management cultures are neither needed nor efficient, and instead are just the product of bad organisation (read: incompetent management) and employees enduring it under the mistaken assumption that “that’s just the way things are”/“there is no other option” because they’ve never worked in an environment with proper management.

If there is one thing that going to Northern Europe and working there taught me is that those things are almost never needed and most definitelly are not universally the way things are.

The only surprise here is that it took them this long to do it.

No you do not.

You don’t want an incredibly tired person prescribing treatment for you or, worse, operating on you, unless you have some kind of death wish.

You want a proper call rota with the doctor “on call” and only the doctor “on call” to have their work phone ON and be available during their on-call hours.

That idea of yours would be perfectly fine if it was just you, but it isn’t: it’s you and all other people who think like you (or if they start by not thinking like you, they’ll change their minds when they see others who do think like that get prompt service whilst they themselves do they not).

That logic just leads to people who if they make a mistake can kill you or give you a problem for life (by prescribing your the wrong medicine or, worse, cutting the wrong thing whilst operating) being very tired and hence way more likely to make mistakes.

Having a single professional having to be on call 24/7 is very much a Tragedy Of The Commons situation - fine if only one or two people used that availability only for very urgent problems, a disgrace for everybody when lots of people innevitably use that availability for any shitty shit little thing.

I’ve been activelly managing my mobile phone pretty much like that since the 90s because after getting my first mobile phone I quickly figured out that if allowed to the thing just turned into a source of near-constant urgent non-essential alerts, in other words, unnecessary stress.

Decades ago, I learned about the whole 4 quadrants thing in management: https://www.testprepchampions.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/4quadrantstimemanagement-1024x768.jpg

You’re supposed to work mostly in the “Important Non-Urgent” quadrant as much as possible and mobile phones if not properly managed constantly pull you to the “Not Important, Not Urgent” which is the worst quadrant to be working in.

In this perspective the problem with mobile phones (and e-mail also to a great extent have a similar problem) is that all notifications/calls look equally important from the outside, so you have to stop doing what you’re doing to check them because they might actually be stuff from the “Important and Urgent” quadrant, but unless you tightly manage it, most of them are not, not least because, if you push back on it hard the people who constantly work in the “Non-Important, Non-Urgent” quadrant (i.e. those who are bad at managing their own time) will make that your problem too.

So what do I do to manage it so that my phone is not a source of stress:

• Calls to my phone for work subjects outside work always (this is important) get a “I’ll talk to you when I’m back at work”. You have to inflexibly refuse to handle work stuff outside work otherwise the number of work calls will just creep up. Also do it from the very start of a new job: your work colleagues need to be trained to expect that from you and you need to provide them with an actual positive out (i.e. “I’ll talk to you when I’m back at work” and actually do it). If an employer needs you to provided out of hours support, that has to be in the contract and there has to be a work phone just for that which will be ON during the hours contracted for that and OFF otherwise.
• Call to my phone for work subjects during work time get triaged and non-urgent or non-important stuff get’s back a “I’m busy now, I’ll talk to you about this when I have the time” if I indeed have something more important or urgent on the plate. Again, train your colleagues to expect that if they call you with non-urgent or non-important stuff there you will not be giving them that sweet feeling of having dumped the problem on somebody else - the objective here is not to “deny service”, it’s to as much as possible have other people do the triaging for you so that you’re only interrupted by things which are worth it.
• E-mail is for non-urgent stuff: when I have the time I’ll look into it. On my phone E-mail arrival notifications will be turned off. Again, work colleagues need to be trained by you to expect exactly that from you. Be organised yourself and have regular “check e-mail” times - this is part of getting other people do the triaging for you.
• All application notifications default to OFF. Very few ever get turned ON and if they abuse it they get turned OFF on the settings. The sending of a notification by an application is a choice of whomever is the maker of the app, hence follows their choices and generally serves their purposes, which means that most application notifications are in some way or another a marketing choice, either directly some kind of sales pitch or indirectly to “remind you of that app”, which means they’re most definitelly neither urgent nor important. Only a handfull of applications deserve to have notification enabled IMHO, and sometimes even some of those abuse that and stop deservings it.

TL;DR - Triage things so that you’re as much as possible spend your time doing Important Non-Urgent things (You go after the non-urgent to reduce the number of things that through doing nothing about it whilst they’re not urgent, go from potential problem into “Oh, shit everything is burning!”). Activelly segregate contact channels based on the triaged level of subjects. Train your colleagues from the start to expect just that (i.e. that e-mails don’t promptly get responded) and always push back from the start against misuse of contact channels (i.e. non-urgent non-important stuff coming via phone gets a response along the lines of “I’m busy with more important stuff, so send me an e-mail about that and I’ll look into it when I have the time”), so that essentially other people will be triaging that stuff for you before they even contact you. As for smartphone Apps, by default assume that notification sending is driven by Marketing considerations of the maker of that app and hence are neither important nor urgent (personally I default to notifications OFF for most apps).

In between the end of the Soviet Union and them signing the Budapest Memorandum and giving the nukes from the ex-Soviet Union that were in their territory to Russia, there was definitelly a period during which the sovereign nation of Ukraine had nukes under their control.

Like all for all other Nazi-style movements, Zionists are going into the next stage of ethno-Fascism: the part were the Zionists start killing other members of the ethnicity they claim to represent for “not being White enough”.

(Just go check how they treat Ethiopian Jews is Israel if you have any doubt that they’re a white supremacist movement)

When human and social situations are interpreted in simplistic one-size-fits-all ways by people who have linked such interpretation to being a member of a “political side”, their takes are not really about what’s best for the people involved, even when they claim otherwise.

There really isn’t any “one size fits all” approach for most human subjects, specially something as socially significant as gender is in most societies.

In my professional experience it’s most specifically people with a sales and sales-like background (which includes grifters).

People whose speciality is “wheeling and dealing” are horrible at managing anything whose success criteria is not purely based on convincing other people of something, so basically anything were actual things must be created, made, distributed and so on.

Since they can’t actually make things work, they instead try and manipulate perception around it to convince others that things are working or for them to do it for them, and the former only holds for a while whilst problems accumulate and things eventually fail in an too-big-to-be deniable way (at which point they try to dump the blame on somebody else), whilst the latter when done by somebody supposedly leading something just yields a parasite manager that doesn’t manage and whose selection of manpower is based on how easy it is to manipulate their “underlings” rather than competence, so things get badly done but said “manager” can’t actually tell until it’s too late.

In all fairness, it’s a Corruption Perception Index, so this doesn’t mean that Corruption before wasn’t horribly bad, just that people did not perceive it so.

It’s not by chance that this index has the curious effect that when the Justice System in a country starts cracking down on Corruption that country’s position on this index gets worse (probably because there are a lot more news about corrupt people being arrested during such a crack down, hence the perception of corruption goes up).

Judging by how these things are managed in the UK, the secret to look good on the index is for the Justice System to not even investigate allegations of Corruption (much less prosecute and convict) so officially there is no Corruption and if the Press ever publishes articles about Corruption they get sued for Defamation by the Corrupt and lose since the de facto Corrupt have never been convicted hence are not de jure so and in the eyes of the Law cannot be publicity said to be Corrupt, so the Press never points out Corruption and people tend to think everything is squeaky clean (mind you, this doesn’t work in countries with lots of low level corruption - say, coppers demanding money for not seeing traffic infractions - because low level corruption is evident in day to day life whilst high level Corruption is not).

I suspect that the Perception of Corruption has been managed in the US in s similar way to how it’s managed in the UK.

Mind you, I’m not saying the US isn’t even more Corrupt now than before, only that the perception of it probably severely underestimated the reality (and quite likely still does).

Ah, yes, the “I don’t trust experts” argument.

If my explanation so far on how the Glass-Steagal forced separation of Retail banking from speculative investing and in doing so protected retail depositors’ money from the bank’s speculative investments blowing up, and the nonexistence of said protections was exactly why the 2008 Crash was so bad and had such widespread effects hence why we can directly trace most of the problems of that Crash to the repealing of said act, then me talking to you is a real life illustration of the pearls to pigs saying.

Your ignorance is 100% willful and there is no point in feeding such trolls.

Then you know nothing of Finance, Economics or how Sector Regulation works - the full impact of regulatory measures on those things takes years or even decades to unfold: we wouldn’t have had 5 decades of Neoliberalism if the full effects of unlimited deregulation were manifested immediately after a regulation is removed.

I was in the Finance Industry when the 2008 Crash happenned and most of what went wrong then would not have been possible if the Glass-Steagal act was still in place, so much so that after the Crash a weakened version of that act was put back in place, only to be thrown out again by Trump during his first presidency.

Clinton knew what the Act was for (plenty of Economists very publicly explained it back then) and why it had been put in place and he repealed it anyways because the Finance Industry could make more profits without that regulation (which they did, for a time, until the Crash, hence the boom-related suplus you loudly celebrated), all of which is very much the situation you described of, once knowing the long term harmful effects of something (specifically in this case, of removing certain regulations), doing it anyway for the short term benefits (the tobbaco industry got profits in their case, Clinton fueled a bubble and that yielded those celebrated Clinton surpluses, plus he personally got lots of money from the Finance Industry after he retired from the presidency).

His responsability is undisputable in Finance circles and all that’s in dispute is how much of the total is his and if he was either reckless (“Conditions have changed so this time it’s not going to happen”), incompetent (i.e. literally did not informed himself about the purpose of the Act he was repealing) or machiavelic (“My friends in the Finance Industry will be very thankful if I remove these costly regulations and if something happens it will be well after I’m POTUS and somebody else will get the blame”) in repealing Glass-Steagal.