The shows antagonists were a wealthy business man turned politician who wielded the corrupt police force to feed his own power and oppress the common folk. And while his nickname was Boss Hogg, the villain’s canon name was Jefferson Davis Hogg. Pretty literally calling the cops confederate pigs.
Definitely a lot of problematic elements to the show, but there’s some good there too. And I’m sure it influenced a ton of car action sequences for decades.
I don’t have much to say other than I like these a lot
But the store piece is the only problem.
For community, there’s tons of different communities for every game and Steam is usually one of the least active anyways.
For mods, as far as I know there’s no exclusivity there. In fact, it’s kind of a pain to mod Bethesda games because they don’t go through Steam. It’s similar to DLC in that it’s just a better experience to have mod support included in the launcher.
For the launcher, that seems like once again a huge blow to consumers to have a separate steam store vs steam launcher. You can already add non-Steam games to the steam launcher or launch games without the steam launcher.
The problems identified in the article, and what they are getting sued for, are solely related to the store. So I don’t see how breaking out these supplemental features would solve that.
So what’s your solution?
Break them up… How?
You can split off business units like their hardware sales or dev studios, but that isn’t going to reduce their storefront market share at all.
Are you suggesting that they just split users up randomly? That would be probably worse for consumers- suddenly the friends and communities people have built up through Steam would be fractured, and users would look to find ways to get around it.
Split up by what publishers they have deals with? Well then those new companies would only be indirect competitors, not to mention that would also be worse for consumers as I’d have to suddenly make a new account with each new platform just to keep accessing my current library.
Like… How do you want to split them up in a way that doesn’t hurt consumers and publishers more than it helps?
So what solution do you propose then?
Ideally I’d like to see media distribution be nationalized. Video streaming, audio streaming, videogames, e-books. There have been multiple cases of companies selling digital goods, then ceasing to provide those with consumers left holding the bag. Multiplayer games whose servers are gone. Movies “purchased” on Amazon that become unavailable when their agreement with the publisher expires. I am concerned about what Valve will look like when they inevitably get new leadership.
But I suffer no delusion that nationalizing that is realistic. Certainly not in the US where I live, where even libraries are under attack from conservatives. I’m doubtful that would happen anywhere else either. So what’s the next-best thing?
Seems to me like the capitalist response would be to try to encourage competition. A lot of companies have tried and failed, so I’m not sure what else can be done on that front.
So… What do you suggest be done about it?
Monopolies are often great for consumers… When they’re nationalized. Obviously that’s not going to happen with Valve any time soon.
What would the benefit be to breaking up Valve? How would you even go about doing that? The obvious choice is to break out different business units- break things like the hardware sales and game development into separate companies. But that still doesn’t address the issue of them having too much market share for software sales.
The next beat thing I can think of would be to have some sort of regulatory body just to place restrictions on the industry. Which, of course, would vary from country to country, and would probably have to include all of their competitors: Epic, GoG, and the various publisher-specific stores, maybe even other storefronts like Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Google, and Apple. It would be hard not to also hit the mobile games industry too (which, to be fair, might be a good thing). But this kind of thing is usually reserved for things like utilities, communications, financial markets, etc. Such an organization for a luxury recreationak market… I have to wonder how much political appetite there really would be for that? Is that really what people want their governments to be focusing on?
Do you have a better solution to propose?
A few years ago my friend’s father passed away. My friend’s mother continued to live in the house for another year or so. She never worked and had to eventually sell the house and downsize.
My friend had referred to her mother as a hoarder before. I’ve seen the reality TV shows about hoarders. But you don’t really understand just how bad the problem is until you spend several days helping your friend clean out their childhood home for sale, filling up several dumpster bags worth of… Stuff. Apparently the mother has always had some mental health problems and a shopping addiction, but spending over a year alone in that house drove her off the deep end.
We could have opened an entire new Harbor Freight store. There were clothes in sizes I didn’t know existed. My wife casually found a pistol just shoved in a random box. It was madness.
The opposite is true as well. A couple years ago I got an alert for a sale on Dualsenses and I pounced on it in the morning. I ordered it in the morning and was expecting to receive it within the next week or two. It arrived in LESS THAN 4 HOURS. I ordered it on my lunch hour and it arrived before I got off work.
I’m not sure if they used some other gig service like DoorDash or Uber Eats or if they just had some store employee deliver it? I don’t mind receiving things that quickly, but I certainly don’t want to force someone to piss in a jug to get me my dumb little consumer electronics faster.
Gomes then sued, alleging absentee ballot mishandling and supplying video footage showcasing Geter-Pataky, a member of the Democratic Town Committee, repeatedly dropping absentee ballots into drop boxes or handing them to others, who then did the same.
If I’m interpreting this correctly, it sounds like a couple of election officials just put absentee ballots in with regular ballots instead of… I assume they should have been set aside for vetting? The article doesn’t say what should have happened. The article doesn’t really go into the impact- seems like they just really, REALLY wanted to print a headline about Democrats meddling in the elections process.
When I think of “stuffing” I think of people creating wholly illegitimate ballots, which does not seem to be what happened here.
Also worth noting that this was for the Democratic primary for a mayoral position in 2019, and some of that info probably should have been in the headline.
Seriously I’m not sure if you messed something up or if Lemmy is messing up but I can’t read any of that text other than the title
I didn’t realize Canadians measured things in 240p
Are you under the impression that Canada doesn’t use imperial measurements for anything?
Do you mean Scarlet and Violet? I largely agree, but the Blueberry Academy DLC was pretty good. It is set in Unova with a lot of Gen V pokemon added and references to those games.
In general, I’d say that the SV main game is one of the worse ones, but the post-game is among the best.
Gen 5 is still the best though.
Link… Look up here! It appears that the time has finally come for you to start your adventure! You will encounter many hardships ahead… That is your fate. Don’t feel discouraged, even during the toughest times! Go straight this way and you will see Hyrule Castle. You will meet a princess there… If you are lost and don’t know which way to go, look at the Map. The areas you have explored will be shown on the map. Press START to enter the subscreens and Z or R to find the map. On the map subscreen, you will also see a flahing dot showing you which way to go next. Did you get all that Yes/No? (Yes) Alright then, I’ll see you around!
Why is this story suddenly getting posted to dozens of communities that in seeing in my feed?
It’s one 73 year old tribal elder who complained that today’s youth don’t respect tradition. This same story has been pre-printed for thousands of years.
I keep scrolling through all and seeing this re-posted over and over again, so to save anyone else the trouble- the NY Times interviewed one 73 year- old tribe elder who complained about the youth not following traditions.
I think we’re done here.
All PS3’s could play PS1 games too