VILNIUS - Three Baltic states on Saturday cut ties with Russia's power grid to join the European Union's network, the culmination of a years-long process that gained urgency with Moscow's invasion of Ukraine.

It's the year 2000 all over again, because I've just spent the past week playing The Sims, a game that could have had a resurgent zeitgeist moment if only EA, the infamous game publisher, had put enough effort in.

A few days ago, EA re-released two of its most legendary games: The Sims and The Sims 2. Dubbed the "The Legacy Collection," these could not even be called remasters. EA just put the original games on Steam with some minor patches to make them a little more likely to work on some modern machines.

The emphasis of that sentence should be on the word "some." Forums and Reddit threads were flooded with players saying the game either wouldn't launch at all, crashed shortly after launch, or had debilitating graphical issues. (Patches have been happening, but there's work to be done yet.)

Further, the releases lack basic features that are standard for virtually all Steam releases now, like achievements or Steam Cloud support.

It took me a bit of time to get it working myself, but I got there, and my time with the game has reminded me of two things. First, The Sims is a unique experience that is worthy of its lofty legacy. Second, The Sims deserved better than this lackluster re-release.

EA didn’t meet its own standard

Look, it's fine to re-release a game without remastering it. I'm actually glad to see the game's original assets as they always were—it's deeply nostalgic, and there's always a tinge of sadness when a remaster overwrites the work of the original artists. That's not a concern here.

But if you're going to re-release a game on Steam in 2025, there are minimum expectations—especially from a company with the resources of EA, and even more so for a game that is this important and beloved.

The game needs to reliably run on modern machines, and it needs to support basic platform features like cloud saves or achievements. It's not much to ask, and it's not what we got.

The Steam forums for the game are filled with people saying it's lazy that EA didn't include Steam Cloud support because implementing that is ostensibly as simple as picking a folder and checking a box.

I spoke with two different professional game developers this week who have previously published games on Steam, and I brought up the issue of Steam Cloud and achievement support. As they tell it, it turns out it's not nearly as simple as those players in the forums believe—but it still should have been within EA's capabilities, even with a crunched schedule.

Yes, it's sometimes possible to get it working at a basic level within a couple of hours, provided you're already using the Steamworks API. But even in that circumstance, the way a game's saves work might require additional work to protect against lost data or frequent problems with conflicts.

Given that the game doesn't support achievements or really anything else you'd expect, it's possible EA didn't use the Steamworks API at all. (Doing that would have been hours of additional work.)

Sadly, this is not the sort of computer bug players are encountering. Credit: Samuel Axon

I'm not giving EA a pass, though. Four years ago, EA put out the Command & Conquer Remastered Collection, a 4K upscale remaster of the original C&C games. The release featured a unified binary for the classic games, sprites and textures that were upscaled to higher resolutions, quality of life improvements, and yes, many of the Steam bells and whistles that include achievements. I'm not saying that the remaster was flawless, but it exhibited significantly more care and effort than The Sims re-release.

I love Command & Conquer. I played a lot of it when I was younger. But even a longtime C&C fan like myself can easily acknowledge that its importance in gaming history (as well as its popularity and revenue potential) pale in comparison to The Sims.

If EA could do all that for C&C, it's all the more perplexing that it didn't bother with a 25th-anniversary re-release of The Sims.

Single-player games, meet publicly traded companies

While we don't have much insight into all the inner workings of EA, there are hints as to why this sort of thing is happening. For one thing, anyone who has worked for a giant corporation like this knows it's all too easy for the objective to be passed down from above at the last minute, leaving no time or resources to see it through adequately.

But it might run deeper than that. To put it simply, publicly traded publishers like EA can't seem to satisfy investors with single-purchase, single-player games. The emphasis on single-player releases has been decreasing for a long time, and it's markedly less just five years after the release of the C&C remaster.

Take the recent comments from EA CEO Andrew Wilson's post-earnings call, for example. Wilson noted that the big-budget, single-player RPG Dragon Age: The Veilguard failed to meet sales expectations—even though it was apparently one of EA's most successful single-player Steam releases ever.

"In order to break out beyond the core audience, games need to directly connect to the evolving demands of players who increasingly seek shared-world features and deeper engagement alongside high-quality narratives in this beloved category," he explained, suggesting that games need to be multiplayer games-as-a-service to be successful in this market.

Ironically, though, the single-player RPG Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 launched around the same time he made those comments, and that game's developer said it made its money back in a single day of sales. It's currently one of the top-trending games on Twitch, too.

It's possible that Baldur's Gate 3 director Swen Vincke hit the nail on the head when he suggested at the Game Developers Conference last year that a particular approach to pursuing quarterly profits runs counter to the practice of making good games.

"I've been fighting publishers my entire life, and I keep on seeing the same, same, same mistakes over and over and over," he said. "It's always the quarterly profits. The only thing that matters are the numbers."

Later on X, he clarified who he was pointing a finger at: "This message was for those who try to double their revenue year after year. You don't have to do that. Build more slowly and make your aim improving the state of the art, not squeezing out the last drop."

In light of Wilson's comments, it's a fair guess that EA might not have put in much effort on The Sims re-releases simply because of a belief that single-player games that aren't "shared world experiences" just aren't worth the resources anymore, given the company's need to satisfy shareholders with perpetual revenue growth.

Despite all this, The Sims is worth a look

It's telling that in a market with too many options, I still put the effort in to get the game working, and I spent multiple evenings this week immersed in the lives of my sims.

Even after 25 years, this game is unique. It has the emergent wackiness of something like RimWorld or Dwarf Fortress, but it has a fast-acting, addictive hook and is easy to learn. There have been other games besides The Sims that are highly productive engines for original player stories, but few have achieved these heights while remaining accessible to virtually everyone.

Like so many of the best games, it's hard to stop playing once you start. There's always one more task you want to complete—or you're about to walk away when something hilariously unexpected happens.

The problems I had getting The Sims to run aren't that much worse than what I surely experienced on my PC back in 2002—it's just that the standards are a lot higher now.

I've gotten $20 out of value out of the purchase, despite my gripes. But it's not just about my experience. More broadly, The Sims deserved better. It could have had a moment back in the cultural zeitgeist, with tens of thousands of Twitch viewers.

Missed opportunities

The moment seems perfect: The world is stressful, so people want nostalgia. Cozy games are ascendant. Sandbox designs are making a comeback. The Sims slots smoothly into all of that.

But go to those Twitch streams, and you'll see a lot of complaining about how the game didn't really get everything it deserved and a sentiment that whatever moment EA was hoping for was undermined by this lack of commitment.

Instead, the cozy game du jour on Twitch is the Animal Crossing-like Hello Kitty Island Adventure, a former Apple Arcade exclusive that made its way to Steam recently. To be clear, I'm not knocking Hello Kitty Island Adventure; it's a great game for fans of the modern cozy genre, and I'm delighted to see an indie studio seeing so much success.

The cozy game of the week is <em>Hello Kitty Island Adventures</em>, not <em>The Sims</em>. Credit: Samuel Axon

The takeaway is that we can't look to big publishers like EA to follow through on delivering quality single-player experiences anymore. It's the indies that'll carry that forward.

It's just a bummer for fans that The Sims couldn't have the revival moment it should have gotten.

Read full article

Comments

Today’s jobs report provides more evidence for the view that inflation remains a very significant problem. Average hourly earnings rose by 0.5%, well above the 0.3% rate consistent with the Fed’s inflation target.

Over the past 12 months, wage inflation has averaged 4.1%, which is only modestly above the roughly 3.0% to 3.5% figure consistent with 2% price inflation. Unfortunately, progress against inflation seems to have stalled, and may be going into reverse. Over the past 6 months, wage inflation has average 4.6%. We seem to be moving in the wrong direction.  High nominal wage inflation increases the risk of recession.

Jed Kolko suggests that there is evidence of a cooling job market:

The first thing to know is that the job market is cooler than previously reported. As foreshadowed last August, average monthly job growth was revised downward from 251,000 to 216,000 in 2023, and from 186,000 to 166,000 in 2024. Whether job growth is too fast and risks overheating the market and pushing up inflation, or too slow and risks pushing up unemployment, depends on how job growth compares with the growth of the labor force. Unfortunately, the annual adjustment to the household survey is not applied historically, so you aren’t supposed to compare labor force estimates over time. But I did a quick-and-dirty simulation in order to do just that. It shows that the big upward adjustment to the population implies that the labor force grew by 150,000 people per month on average in 2024, versus 90,000 as officially reported.

He’s referring to revisions in the jobs data for previous months.  The payroll survey of businesses is generally viewed as more reliable, and job growth in that series was revised downward.  Job growth in the household survey (used for constructing the unemployment rate) was revised upward.  Kolko points out that these two revisions mostly closed an unusual gap in the two series that had opened up during 2024:

The upward adjustment to employment in the household survey and the downward revision to employment in the payroll survey closed most of the gap in reported employment between the surveys that opened in recent years. 

In my view, we put too much weight on the employment figures, at least when it comes to forecasting inflation.  It is true that wage inflation and employment are correlated, but the link depends on a number of factors.  For instance, the recent immigration crackdown (which began in mid-2024) has likely led to slower population growth.  This means that a slower pace of job growth does not necessarily imply a “cooling” jobs market.    I expect job growth to slow fairly significantly in 2025, as the recent immigration crackdown filters through to the job market, and also because the Fed may tighten policy to bring inflation down to its 2% target.  And that’s not even accounting for possible Trump administration policies such as the expulsion of illegal immigrants and a trade war with the rest of the world.

In the end, it is the wage inflation figures that matter most for macroeconomic stability.  At the most fundamental level, good macro policy is mostly about getting low and stable nominal wage inflation.  All the other outcomes that we wish to see (a strong jobs market, low price inflation, etc.), require low and stable nominal wage growth.

Unfortunately, nominal wages are sticky.  Thus we may not know whether wage growth is excessive until it is too late.  That’s why economists look at “real” indicators such as job growth when trying to figure out if the economy is overheating or underheating.  But these real indicators are also hard to interpret, because just as we don’t know the underlying rate of wage inflation in real time, we don’t know the underlying rate of labor force growth in real time.

Given all of these uncertainties, I still believe that NGDP level targeting is the least bad monetary policy framework.  We are now almost 5 years past the Covid lockdowns.  The Fed is running out of excuses and losing credibility.  It is time to take the inflation target seriously, or else set a new target that honestly reflects what the Fed is trying to achieve.

PS.  The Bloomberg article linked to at the top of the post has a graph of monthly employment gains in the payroll survey:

(2 COMMENTS)

I review a very good new book on occupational licensing, The Licensing Racket by Rebecca Haw Allensworth in the WSJ.

Most people will concede that licensing for hair braiders and interior decorators is excessive while licensing for doctors, nurses and lawyers is essential. Hair braiders pose little to no threat to public safety, but subpar doctors, nurses and lawyers can ruin lives. To Ms. Allensworth’s credit, she asks for evidence. Does occupational licensing protect consumers? The author focuses on the professional board, the forgotten institution of occupational licensing.

Governments enact occupational-licensing laws but rarely handle regulation directly—there’s no Bureau of Hair Braiding. Instead, interpretation and enforcement are delegated to licensing boards, typically dominated by members of the profession. Occupational licensing is self-regulation. The outcome is predictable: Driven by self-interest, professional identity and culture, these boards consistently favor their own members over consumers.

Ms. Allensworth conducted exhaustive research for “The Licensing Racket,” spending hundreds of hours attending board meetings—often as the only nonboard member present. At the Tennessee board of alarm-system contractors, most of the complaints come from consumers who report the sort of issues that licensing is meant to prevent: poor installation, code violations, high-pressure sales tactics and exploitation of the elderly. But the board dismisses most of these complaints against its own members, and is far more aggressive in disciplining unlicensed handymen who occasionally install alarm systems. As Ms. Allensworth notes, “the board was ten times more likely to take action in a case alleging unlicensed practice than one complaining about service quality or safety.”

She finds similar patterns among boards that regulate auctioneers, cosmetologists and barbers. Enforcement efforts tend to protect turf more than consumers. Consumers care about bad service, not about who is licensed, so take a guess who complains about unlicensed practitioners? Licensed practitioners. According to Ms. Allensworth, it was these competitor-initiated cases, “not consumer complaints alleging fraud, predatory sales tactics, and graft,” where boards gave the stiffest penalties.

You might hope that boards that oversee nurses and doctors would prioritize patient safety, but Ms. Allensworth’s findings show otherwise. She documents a disturbing pattern of boards that have ignored or forgiven egregious misconduct, including nurses and physicians extorting sex for prescriptions, running pill mills, assaulting patients under anesthesia and operating while intoxicated.

Read the whole thing.

The post The Licensing Racket appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

In combating DEI, Donald Trump is doing the right thing. In that sentence I just wrote, I almost choked writing the six final words. But it is what I believe. A stopped clock is right twice a day, and it is high time America engaged in an honest conversation about this business called Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

However, the actual substance of Trump’s Executive Order “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing” reveals—big surprise—a smash of the knout, a coarse, unreflective bleat in the guise of statecraft. Getting DEI right while retaining the moral sophistication our nation is capable of will require actions much more specific—intelligent, even.

Make no mistake: it has been high time for a major rethink on what DEI has turned into since the pandemic, with DEI becoming a term of art for what is too often an institutionalized anti-whiteness. Under this conception, if outcomes between races aren't equal, the only possible reason can be discrimination—i.e. some kind of white malfeasance, whether intended or not—and egregious enough that rules and standards must be changed. A watchcry of adherents of this philosophy is Ibram X. Kendi’s famous quote in his massively influential How to Be an Antiracist: “When I see disparities, I see racism.”

This kind of DEI took root especially in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, when a radical contingent calling for a racial reckoning enforced an allegiance to anti-whiteness on pain of social media humiliation, cancellation, and unemployment. Between September 2019 and September 2020, DEI positions jumped by 56.3%. In 2023, Tabia Lee, a Black woman, was ousted from the directorship of the DEI program at De Anza Community College for, as she alleged in her lawsuit, being insufficiently opposed to whiteness (Jews included) and “not the right kind of Black person.” Lee has said, “The default here in America especially is [a type of DEI] that focuses on racial division and perpetual strife around racialized identity.”

Subscribe now

If all of this were somehow constructive then maybe we could talk about how you have to crack eggs to make omelettes. But none of the news about this incarnation of DEI has been good. There is copious evidence—“hundreds of studies dating back to the 1930s,” write sociologists Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev—to suggest that the corporate anti-bias training central to its mission simply doesn't work. It does not meaningfully change employees’ thinking, and tends to be recalled instead as mere hoops they had to jump through. “You spend some money, you get people excited, and then a year later, you’re at the same place,” says DEI strategist Lily Zheng, the author of DEI Deconstructed. At the University of Michigan, the main result of a campus-wide DEI infusion has—according to a deeply-reported New York Times Magazine piece—been frustration, discomfort, and alienation. “The most common attitude I encountered about DEI during my visits to Ann Arbor was a kind of wary disdain,” Nicholas Confessore wrote in The Times to summarize his months of reporting at Michigan. DEI’s casual reference to racial categories as determinative is both facile and menacing, recalling the phrenological nonsense of another time. Take the pitilessly dehumanizing conception of “whiteness” that Coca-Cola employees, for instance, have been fed in DEI trainings: If you are white, apparently you should know that you are inherently oppressive, arrogant, smug, defensive, ignorant, that you lack humility and have a hard time listening or believing, that you resist apathy, and that you embrace white solidarity.

That characterization of whiteness may sound familiar to those who read Robin DiAngelo’s best-selling White Fragility, a book that manifests another problem with post-2020 DEI: incoherent argumentation. To take one of the more absurd examples from her book, DiAngelo writes that Americans are so blithely racist as to believe that Jackie Robinson was the first Black person who was skilled enough at baseball to play in the Major Leagues, as opposed to presuming that racism had previously barred Black people from them.

Overall, this new, prevailing DEI is based on a core assumption that battling the power of whiteness be not just one goal, but the central goal of our institutions. This is a simplistic and needlessly restrictive niche ideology, allowed freer rein than any mature society should permit. Following from that vantage-point, DEI bureaucracies have swelled beyond any plausible conception of utility: in Fairfax County, Virginia, the public school system’s DEI bureaucracy now numbers some 52 employees with a combined salary ($6.4 million dollars a year) that could pay for 125 extra teachers. Only through this idea that battling whiteness’ power should be the core of human endeavor does it possibly make sense for universities to require diversity statements of applicants even to faculty jobs in STEM subjects.

We can understand these trends better if we recognize that modern DEI is equivalent to a religious faith in Europe circa 1300 A.D., fully equipped with seminary-trained clergy aglow with Good News whom it is immoral to question. DEI’s hegemony is a legacy of peak woke, freezing us in a pendulum swing to the hard left that reached its apogee sometime around June 2020. It’s been in place for a while, and to dismiss resistance to it as mere racism is reductive. Trump did not go on a witch hunt against affirmative action during his first term—it is the post-2020 detour of DEI that animated his minions’ current attack.

Subscribe now

The problem with Trump’s executive order is that it goes beyond addressing this recent transmogrification of DEI and puts a wholesale pox on what a certain kind of person is given to calling “stirring up that stuff” about race. It would stand to reason that the proper approach to DEI overall (which has in essence been a new term for affirmative action) is, as President Bill Clinton put it about racial preferences in the 1990s, to “Mend it, not end it” i.e. to try and improve a worthy project that has its flaws. There is no mending in Trump’s order, which instead attempts to simply vaporize any institutionalized commitment to social justice.

One can be utterly revolted by the way DEI has been practiced of late while still supporting institutions that use outreach strategies to identify applicants less likely to come to their attention via normal channels. Organizations should not be barred from investigating possible injustice or—as Trump’s executive order endeavors to inhibit—to sharing data with third-party DEI entities.

Surely the idea is not that teaching about Black history, including the profound role that racism has played in it, is “radical and wasteful,” to quote what the order targets. That our country openly addresses Black history is a badge of honor and a sign of compassion. And yet Trump’s executive order has already made the U.S. Air Force feel it necessary to take off-line a teaching video on Tuskegee airmen. A change like that is grievous.

One of the most appalling aspects of Trump’s anti-DEI animus is that he has gone as far as to rescind Lyndon Johnson’s seminal 1965 executive order that prohibited discriminatory practices in hiring and employment within the federal government and which introduced the phrase “affirmative action” into widespread use.

Trump attempts to justify himself in his executive order, “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity,” which rescinds the 1965 order. And I do get it—favoring Black hires can be interpreted as a kind of discrimination against whites. That’s an old argument, and one that has never met a true smackdown reply. For that reason I have always thought racial preferences in university admissions should have been applied as a temporary measure rather than one preserved until a Great Day when racism doesn’t exist.

But while deep-sixing the nakedly anti-white posturing of today’s DEI is one thing, it is another to strike down the basic acknowledgement that people should be given a fair shake regardless of sex or color. A mature society endeavors to search for talent beyond where it might seem most intuitive to look and uses imagination—and compassion—in allocating avenues to success. Affirmative action, in its initial sense—unsullied by the distortions of identity politics, the tacit commitment to lowering standards, and the temptations of virtue signalling—was a model of moral advancement for the world and something that the United States could be proud of.

Outlawing affirmative action of any kind, as Trump attempts to do, will discourage institutions from trying to level the playing field at all. This overreaction to DEI’s acknowledged missteps not only sets us back—it is immorality incarnate.

John McWhorter is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University, a columnist for The New York Times, and a member of Persuasion’s Board of Advisors. He is the author of, most recently, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.

Follow Persuasion on Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube to keep up with our latest articles, podcasts, and events, as well as updates from excellent writers across our network.

And, to receive pieces like this in your inbox and support our work, subscribe below:

Subscribe now

Newly unsealed emails allegedly provide the "most damning evidence" yet against Meta in a copyright case raised by book authors alleging that Meta illegally trained its AI models on pirated books.

Last month, Meta admitted to torrenting a controversial large dataset known as LibGen, which includes tens of millions of pirated books. But details around the torrenting were murky until yesterday, when Meta's unredacted emails were made public for the first time. The new evidence showed that Meta torrented "at least 81.7 terabytes of data across multiple shadow libraries through the site Anna’s Archive, including at least 35.7 terabytes of data from Z-Library and LibGen," the authors' court filing said. And "Meta also previously torrented 80.6 terabytes of data from LibGen."

"The magnitude of Meta’s unlawful torrenting scheme is astonishing," the authors' filing alleged, insisting that "vastly smaller acts of data piracy—just .008 percent of the amount of copyrighted works Meta pirated—have resulted in Judges referring the conduct to the US Attorneys’ office for criminal investigation."

Seeding expands authors’ distribution theory

Book authors had been pressing Meta for more information on the torrenting because of the seemingly obvious copyright concern of Meta seeding, and thus seemingly distributing, the pirated books in the dispute.

But Meta resisted those discovery attempts after an order denied authors' request to review Meta's torrenting and seeding data. That didn't stop authors from gathering evidence anyway, including a key document that starts with at least one staffer appearing to uncomfortably joke about the possible legal risks, eventually growing more serious about raising his concerns.

"Torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn’t feel right," Nikolay Bashlykov, a Meta research engineer, wrote in an April 2023 message, adding a smiley emoji. In the same message, he expressed "concern about using Meta IP addresses 'to load through torrents pirate content.'"

By September 2023, Bashlykov had seemingly dropped the emojis, consulting the legal team directly and emphasizing in an email that "using torrents would entail ‘seeding’ the files—i.e., sharing the content outside, this could be legally not OK."

Emails discussing torrenting prove that Meta knew it was "illegal," authors alleged. And Bashlykov's warnings seemingly landed on deaf ears, with authors alleging that evidence showed Meta chose to instead hide its torrenting as best it could while downloading and seeding terabytes of data from multiple shadow libraries as recently as April 2024.

Meta allegedly concealed seeding

Supposedly, Meta tried to conceal the seeding by not using Facebook servers while downloading the dataset to "avoid" the "risk" of anyone "tracing back the seeder/downloader" from Facebook servers, an internal message from Meta researcher Frank Zhang said, while describing the work as in "stealth mode." Meta also allegedly modified settings "so that the smallest amount of seeding possible could occur," a Meta executive in charge of project management, Michael Clark, said in a deposition.

Now that new information has come to light, authors claim that Meta staff involved in the decision to torrent LibGen must be deposed again, because allegedly the new facts "contradict prior deposition testimony."

Mark Zuckerberg, for example, claimed to have no involvement in decisions to use LibGen to train AI models. But unredacted messages show the "decision to use LibGen occurred" after "a prior escalation to MZ," authors alleged.

Meta did not immediately respond to Ars' request for comment and has maintained throughout the litigation that AI training on LibGen was "fair use."

However, Meta has previously addressed its torrenting in a motion to dismiss filed last month, telling the court that "plaintiffs do not plead a single instance in which any part of any book was, in fact, downloaded by a third party from Meta via torrent, much less that Plaintiffs’ books were somehow distributed by Meta."

While Meta may be confident in its legal strategy despite the new torrenting wrinkle, the social media company has seemingly complicated its case by allowing authors to expand the distribution theory that's key to winning a direct copyright infringement claim beyond just claiming that Meta's AI outputs unlawfully distributed their works.

As limited discovery on Meta's seeding now proceeds, Meta is not fighting the seeding aspect of the direct copyright infringement claim at this time, telling the court that it plans to "set... the record straight and debunk... this meritless allegation on summary judgment."

Read full article

Comments