Yeah. Open Source comouter-controlled equipment would be the ideal solution. If the computer fucks up, you can replace it for 50 bucks and flash it from a USB drive.

And tractors have a great history of open-source modding. The PTO and 3-point hitch are gold standards of open standards.

I do have a 2-ended USB drive with A and C and it’s glorious.

Xbox and Playstation developed the platforms the games are on and sold the consoles at a loss.

Retailers have physical overhead that gar exceeds Steam’s cost per sale.

Steam doesn’t have those reasons. They just wanted a bigger cut without incurring the expenses.

Steam was the first major online games distribution platform. Who else would have set the standard?

It’s the industry standard for online PC game sales because of them. They established that number when they were the first major player to the market. They don’t get to blame the industry for a pricing scheme they invented.

This is the company that didn’t offer refunds until they had to. They’re the company that used to make indie developers get permission to launch games through them with exclusivity agreements (Steam Greenlight program). They cry foul when devs put in loot boxes, gacha mechanics, and other live service bullshit when they don’t get a 30% cut.

They’ve been exactly as shitty as they can get away with. The only things that have allowed them to be less shitty are that they were first to the game and that they’re privately-owned l, meaning they do what’s in Gabe’s long-term interest instead of having to drive the stock price up every quarter until they collapse or allergens with someone else.

When Steam launched, gamers were very upset because they didn’t want to have to log into an online marketplace to play Half-Life 2. And now people get pissy when the games they want dont require you to give data and money to a billionaire who long ago stopped giving a fuck about gamers as anything other than a means to buy more yachts.

What is their fault is using their monopoly status to charge 30% of sales for an online storefront. For many games, Steam’s cut is the single largest expense.

If you’re a developer of a game being sold on Steam, Gabe Newell’s personal cut on the game that wasn’t produced, published, or marketed by him or any company he owns is more than yours because he charges an unconscionable toll for the storefront.

If Steam charged 5% instead of 30% they’d still be making a killing, but since they have an an effective monopoly it doesn’t matter.

Yeah, but how many people are eating that meat versus those almonds.

I’ve lost several people to suicide. The hardest was a good friend I’d known for years and who had been my roommate one summer.

That one was 25 years ago and it still hurts.

When I was a preacher I did a sermon based on that episode. It’s such an accurate picture of a teenager finding a social group that happened to be at church. And Hank accurately calls out how shallow that kind of social faith is.

At the end of the episode, Hank pulls out a box of crap from fads Bobby had been into and talked about how he didn’t want Bobby’s spirituality to end up in that box.

For millions of people, church is basically a club where they meet with their friends, and since the church is still the most racially segregated place in America, that’s a problem.

The “Christian Club” mentality is what allowed the rise of the religious right, when churches should be vocal about justice for the the sick, the poor, and the foreigners.

The athletes that openly take drugs to compete in these games will be banned from all other contests, so anyone who is already competitive isn’t going to take part.

A top-tier athlete without PEDs is gonna outperform lesser athletes who use them.

Years ago saw someone copy/pasting stuff in Excel one field at a time using the “Edit” menu. She told me this way she knew it was working.

I had to walk away.

I will also say that back then computers were a lot scarier, since many people had never used them. People were terrified of clicking the wrong thing.

They actually work in tandem now. And honestly, some of the generative stuff in Adobe products I find genuinely useful. Specifically I really like the AI noise reduction in Lightroom. It allows people with less-expensive cameras to have better end results.

Can we save scum?

Because market conditions are fucking insane right now. If they allow backorder and their production price doubles they would have to either honor the orders and take a huge loss, or refuse to honor the price and take a reputational hit.

All of those stories feature saviors instead of popular uprisings.

Because it doesn’t matter if 95% of the software you use works fine on Linux or Mac if you need that last 5% tondo your work.

That’s a brilliant joke and it bothers me more people didn’t notice it.

Does Nixon get a mech suit and the ability to summon the headless body of Spiro Agnew?

They don’t make the drink and then pour in rubbing alcohol at the end.

Non-alcoholic versions of drinks cost at least as much to produce (many cost more because they’re removing the alcohol at the end of the process), and they’re way less popular, so the economies of scale makes the alcoholic versions cheaper per unit.

Yeah. This is something I’ve been trying to explain for a while. Between the Steam Deck and the declining overall market share of PCs, there’s a huge jump in Linux as far as percentage of users goes, but it isn’t actually making significant waves in general usage. Regular users are sticking with Windows and Mac, but now there’s 1 Windows or Mac laptop in a household shared by everyone now versus multiple laptops and a desktop a few hardware cycles back.