Thank Mr Skeltal

Based take imo. I think many posters fail realize the insane amount of money steam makes Valve. Rough estimates are that Steam sold 400 million games last year. Average cost for a game is ~$15.5. Steam has a platform fee of 30%. That means that, roughly, Steam made Valve ~1.86 billion dollars just through the sell of games. Not considering microtransactions or hardware sells. Reportedly, Valve made 1 billion dollars just off cases from CS2 crate openings. Let’s just give Valve the benefit of the doubt and assume they made $5 billion dollars last year.

Impressive, but honestly not that impressive when you consider that Xbox brought in 18 billion and PlayStation brought in 30 billion last year. However, if you factor in that Xbox has a head count of ~$20,100 and Sony has one of ~12,700. While Valve has a head count of about ~400. We see that Xbox and Sony are bringing in about $900K and $2.4M per head respectively. Valve is bring in 12.5M per head. Plus Xbox and PlayStation have multiple studios and campuses. While I believe Valve only has the 1 or 2 campuses and they are their only studio.

My point being that, Valve has a ton of liquid cash for investment and growth opportunities. I’d wager Valve brought in more than 5 Billion last year, but with them being a private company, it’s hard to pin down what exactly they could’ve made.

Steam doesn’t control the quality of remasters. That’s up to publishers. I’m not the most active gamer and might have missed something, but didn’t valve release a major revamp to the way the Library and Store were layed out in the past year or two? They also recently expanded family sharing and remote co-op. The only L I can remember in recent memory is the whole “You can’t leave your games to another person when you die”

My only issue with piracy is it doesn’t add to the number of streams. So it might cause some studios to cancel shows they don’t think are performing well.

Tbh, I don’t feel as strong about social studies/history. If I had to pick though, probably yellow because I mostly of dirt roads, roman gold, and the pyramids and those all feel yellow. But History is so subjective on what you take from it that you could probably make an argument for any color

You got science right, but math is blue because it’s cold and calculating while English is red because it’s full of passion and life

Based take. Seemed we learned nothing from Trump and What-aboutism. Just because Facebook does it and doesn’t get in trouble doesn’t mean Facebook is in the right. It means you should get mad and demand change from them too.

Also I might have missed this, but didn’t everyone get mad at tiktok last or a couple of years ago for circumventing Android and Apple app policies and collecting data they shouldn’t? I though Facebook and Twitter obeyed those policies, they just had other means to collect that data.

Have you looked into Purely mail? This is what I use for my custom email needs. I don’t remember all the pros and cons, but the big one that scares most people off is it’s run by one guy. So if something happens to him, you’re potentially SOL. You could probably migrate to a new service, but could potentially be a huge pain.

I volunteered as tribute to be one of these ‘Friends’

Can I donate $60 bucks to double amount of winners? I don’t have have much time to game, but I thought this was such a kind way to help out the community that Id like to help out as well.

Feels like the Spanish flu all over

Got a source for the Rabies and computer generated movies? Would be interested to read on that

Not OP, but I run both because Plex was/is easier to setup non-techy family members and easier to get on their TVs/devices.

Plex has been pissing me off though and I’d like to move to Jellyfin, but sounds like a PITA to transfer everything over. Gonna have to get clever with that probably

Don’t get me wrong it’s unsettling, but I agree, I don’t see the initial harm. I see it as creating a physical manifestation of someone’s inner thoughts. I can definitely see how it could become or encourage dangerous situations, but that’s like banning alcohol because it could lead to drunk driving or sexual assault.

This was more of the point I was trying to hit but couldn’t think of

Pancakes

Off topic slightly, but I’ve seen on Lemmy lately where people are saying “get rid of gerrymandering” and I’m curious about the argument for this.

Honestly, I’d love for it to happen, but I assumed it was impossible in a Representative Democracy because of how the system/math worked. Kinda of an inherit problem. Mostly because the ways I’ve heard to remedy this issue is to distribute districts in such a way that they more closely resemble their population ratios. However, isn’t this also a form of gerrymandering? Districts are getting set to way we think they should be. Not saying that wrong persay, just feel like a bandage solution. Like we’re beating a nail in with a wrench. In a way though, this reminds me of the Observer Effect in a way

But Foxconn isn’t an employee of Apple. Their a contractor. This would more than likely setup companies to be more or less nesting Russian dolls. Funnily enough, it would make it harder to track money between companies because now there is so much noise

My only issue with point 3 is wouldn’t that make members of Congress more tempted by bribes and such? Sure, we can out law it and say it’s bad, but as my uncle always told me, it’s only illegal if you get caught.

Not the original person you replied too, but I don’t mind having hard conversations and trying to expand my world view. Now personally, I’m pro-“Student Debt Fixing”. From what I can tell, I think setting the interest rate to 0% would be the best fix. I’m not opposed to paying back what I owe, I just don’t think the government should be profiting from its citizens. However, I admit I’m not an economist and understand I’m probably misunderstanding something.

Not you make a fair amount points and honestly, I don’t want to address them all (I’m tired :( )

• I know you mentioned where you’re from, interest rates are capped, but I don’t believe we have those in an effective form for the U.S. for student loans. Loans provided by the Government have their interest rate set each year by Congress and usually it’s around 4-5%, but Congress can set it whatever they’d like. I can’t speak for private loans because I don’t have private student loans because it’s was always a bad offer for my situation.

• I don’t completely buy your argument that if the government forgives a $180,000 loan that it’s money from the Federal Reserve that covers it and thus inflates the economy by $180k. Like if you wanted $100 for food and I gave it to you and I decided to forgive it. I don’t consider it paying myself $100 to account for it. I view it more “I gave up the opportunity to make $100”. Remind me of that joke about two economist in the forest.

• How is the government nefarious for forgiving loans? You claim it’s about gaining greater control over the populous. However your own argument is forgiving loans would basically cause inflation to go up. Causing people to buy and save less. Hurting businesses in the process. Possibly causing a recession or even worse a depression. Meaning that the government would be at its weakest because that’s usually when taxes are also at their weakest. Historically, governments have their most control when populations are fat and happy. Most civil unrest are in uncertain times, such as recessions and depressions. If anything it’s more nefarious for the government to keep the loans and jack up the interest rates where people have no ability to pay it off and can’t bankrupt out of it.

• While some of school tuition can be attributed to supply and demand. It can mostly be attributed to a change in how much grant money was awarded to student for college by some president in the 70s or 80s. Normally, I find out who it was, but again I’m tired. I think it was Nixon or Reagan, but Adam Ruins Everything has a decent video on it. Basically, since students couldn’t bankrupt out of loans and the US govt was the backer for these loans, colleges realized it was basically a free money glitch. So instead of competing on education per dollar, some started going for amenities per dollar. So Gyms, Pools, Various sport fields, other random as shit. Some of things had stupid price tags for maintenance alone and that greatly assisted in helping prices go up. Now why didn’t students be smart and choose their college more wisely? I think it’s best to remind ourselves of the demographic we’re dealing with. Often vain and short term thinkers. Some of them aren’t even done developing their brains. Plus I think it’s rich to give upset at people for making dumb choices before going to the place that makes them smart enough to realize how dumb they there. It’s like getting mad at your car for being broken before you take it to shop to get repaired.

My hands hurt and my eyes yearn for sleep. Good night!