I do want a TV that can access Netflix etc without another box. I just don’t want the surveillance that comes with it.

He made it on his own. 40 Million copies even at 10$ and with steam taking 30% is still 280,000,000$. I honestly don’t think you need to worry for ConcernedApe’s financial situation.

So far foreign companies don’t appear to be eating the cost. So the impact to their competitiveness seems to not be high enough to force them. It’s likely to stay that way.

It’s important to understand that if you place tariffs on all imports of a certain good, you also incentivize domestic manufacturers to increase their prices to just below those of the taxed imports, at least as long as domestic supply is lower than domestic demand (so they can expect to sell all they have anyway).

They are using this to leverage their way into control over your system. They are trying to become the iOS of PC’s, where you can’t install or run anything Microsoft didn’t collect protection money on.

Spirits that I’ve cited

My commands ignore.

Also, slave labor.

Enshittification is the process of squeezing money out of both sides of the transaction after you have built a sufficient customer and supplier base with initially attractive offerings that were possibly made at a loss.

First the service is great for consumers (and likely bleeding money). People flock to it.

Then they use that consumer base to lure more suppliers to the platform. Phase two. The service is great for suppliers because it means easy access to a big customer base.

When both a lot of customers and a lot of suppliers are using the platform they start making changes that redirect revenue from both sides to the platform itself. Prices increase, fees for suppliers increase or their cut decreases, maybe they have to sign that they won’t sell under a certain price elsewhere, customers can’t use all things on the platform anymore without paying extra, they introduce ads, maybe exclusives, that stuff. Customers won’t leave because they are used to the platform, there are network effects (all my friends use it), sunk cost fallacies (I have paid them x dollars over the years and if I leave I keep nothing for it) in the case of gamepass they have maybe stopped buying games elsewhere and wouldn’t have a library at all if they lost access. Suppliers won’t leave because the customer base is huge and they have no other simple way to reach those customers. Both are the literal frog in slowly boiling water. “What’s a few more bucks a month, what’s a little additional ad before my game loads, what’s a few more % to MS when the alternative is losing all those customers”. That’s the enshittification part.

greedy devs

Publishers, mostly.

No no no, they wanted to abolish oBaMaCaRe. Totally different thing. Obama is an evil commie, you know?

That’s the neat thing, they won’t. It’s pretty easy to apply a high tax on moving away. In fact the USA of all places do just that.

Also, what do rich people possess? Assets. Physical assets. A big part of that is real estate, owned privately or by companies they own. There’s no taking that with you. They can sell their assets and try to take the money with them, but that means the society they leave gets it’s assets back.

Huh, curious, I could swear we Germans (and most other countries I’m sure) used to do just that until a glorious neoliberal government came along and abolished the tax.

Oh, Daeran must be one of my all time favorite RPG characters, even though I hated him initially. Regill and Ember are great too.

Owlcat can pull this off, at least from the storytelling side. The shooter gameplay is something I haven’t seen from them, so let’s hope that’ll work out.

I’m hyped.

If you want to blow the whistle on somebody and wonder if the Guardian is trustworthy I suggest you ask Julian Assange.

Garbage out is what he aims for.

Indian Creek has referred to this request as “extortion.”

Strange. I could swear it was called a “free market”.

You first.

What if it was an unusually charismatic zombie with a tragic backstory?

Ok. How would you say does it prep?

What definitely did happen to me is I booted into windows, shut down, on the next startup there was no grub menu, just instant boot into windows. (Separate physical drives).