• 1.85K Posts
  • 1.25K Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: September 2nd, 2023

help-circle







  • Recent example - Poland renamed Kaliningrad (a territory it owned briefly ages ago) to Królewiec for shits and giggles similar to what Trump did with Gulf of America thing. It shows up as Królewiec in Poland and nowhere else because why would it affect anyone else?

    Older example - since Russia annexed Crimea Google Maps in those countries has reflected official borders but for the rest of the world it’s just a dotted line.

    You’d probably find a lot of disputed names and borders between India/Pakistan/China where similar stuff happens.

    What I’m trying to say that while Google didn’t necessarily follow their own guidelines, their actual priority was to be pragmatic, unobtrusive or invisible. This change is unexpected because it’s very much „in your face” for everyone everywhere.





















  • Adding gambling to video games without verifying user age is targeting children with gambling. There’s a lot of convenient combinations of circumstances that Valve is fully aware of and profiting from. I don’t care about plausible deniability because Valve employees were visibly smug and amused when questioned about it. There is no absolving Valve after this.

    You blame others for Valve monopoly. Yeah, I said they missed the ship. We have a private monopoly in PC gaming storefronts now and that’s not good. It doesn’t matter if they won fair - they are a parasitic middle-man that makes everyone lose.

    Ask yourself and be honest about it: if Valve had a true competitor would their cut be as high as it is now? This is the only thing you should be concerned about, not that they engage in Linux philanthropy or that they make cool games.



  • Valve runs a couple of online casinos that target children specifically, not sure we should be arguing who’s worse here. I think Steam is a clunky piece of software that’s popular mostly because everyone else missed the moment to start competing and Valve gained monopoly unopposed. Other viable competitors tried and failed at even gaining a foothold and are relegated to small niches because it’s impossible to move people who amassed content libraries over the years. Valve skims 10-30% of an insanely large volume of transactions and should be held to a much higher standard. You’re ignoring all of the warning signs because they didn’t screw you over yet.