There are some games tbat are sold on both steam and other platforms. Many of these games have external modding communities. Steam provides slick integration for “workshop” mods, which helps drive sales.

A few years back steam used to allow fairly open API access if you acquired the game elsewhere and just wanted the mods. And then they turned it off, but still allow direct anonymous downloads. A decision that only makes sense if they wanted to lock in any steam-adopted community to make going elsewhere difficult.

Turning off something people were using to avoid potential competitors is kinda exactly what would count as “monopolistic behavior” if Steam were to be ruled a monopoly by a court

The American right is all about pretending they didn’t lose. Short list of examples in cronological order:

• the civil war
• the great depression.
• the JFK / Nixon POTUS election
• the vietnam war
• the Afghanistan war
• the Biden / Trump election

Of course the USA lost this thing with Iran. We didn’t even state a clear goal and STILL wound up in a state where the absolute best we could hope to describe it is as a draw.

It isn’t running to the right to describe things factually. Reality, after all, has a well known left-wing bias.

Starfield is “fine” if you compare it to stock Skyrim or fallout 4.

It continues the aggravating tradition of being a rubber-banded pseudo-sandbox with just enough randomness to make you realize how little randomness there is in the game.

I read it as “torrent isn’t stealing, but if it was id do it even harder because those guys suck”.

A billion 3-inch circular tailpipes have the area of a 1.5 mile tailpipe.

Which would be… Very big.

Linguistic drift requires a considerable majority understanding, not just a large minority

By way of example, no matter how many men think “chartreuse” is a vaguely pink color or that “trans-man” includes Caitlyn Jenner, it’ll still be lime-green and Eliot Page.

Dictionaries are free to note whatever definition they want, but so is everyone else

Decimation means “lose 10%”, not “lose all BUT 10℅”

If two people suddenly quit your twenty-man team you’ve been decimated. If eight or eighteen people quit you’ve been devastated.

(Plus a bunch of “politics” and civil rights things.)

POLITELY assert your rights on the streets. If an officer asks if they can search your trunk, tell them that you would rather they didn’t.

“Do I have to” and it’s variants are deferential without necessarily ceding your rights in a way that “oh, sure” does. They don’t need any cause at all if you give permission, and if you give permission it’s going to be hard or impossible to argue later that it was an unreasonable search.

The sad truth is that you need to assume that you’re on camera whenever you interact with a police officer, act as if whatever you say will be either edited and shown to the jury or described to them out of context to justify whatever bad actions the officer takes.

100% be polite and even friendly, but 0% on “just let the officer do whatever and think you can fight it in court later.”

None of the issues with police in America would be fixed by taking away their unions. Nor do any of the fixes require doing so.

ACAB, but even class-betraying bastards are workers who deserve a collective voice in how they are managed.

Again, self-serving quotes from unthinking capitalists doesn’t refute the idea that billionaires are leeches we’d be better off without.

“Job creator” is as absurd an label for their rent-seeking chicainery as the ides that corporate founders “pulled themselves up by the bootstrapz”. ~which in turn is the rough equivalent of “I’ll just fund my venture by shitting a gold brick.”~

Not at all. “Lying” is a very high bar that most tabloids are able to easily stay under.

I infer that the names you mentioned are NYC billionaires who threatened to leave. And that it’s only a threat at this point. But it wouldnt even call them telling the Post that they want to leave as a lie–even though I suspect they aren’t going to actually go.

Let me restate my position clearly. Billionares are a drain on any society and improve nearly everyplace by leaving. What NYC might lose in hypothetical income tax from two billionaires moving elsewhere is more than made up by the reduction in competition for everything that poor NYers need to survive.

1: the NY Post is a tabloid generally worth ignoring.

2: A tabloid story saying unnamed “NY Leaders” want what billionaires want should be treated as nothing more than a statement of preference for what the tabloid’s (billionaire) owners want.

3: Even if Mamdani suddenly gets on his knees and grovels for billionaires to stay it wouldn’t argue that billionaires staying is a good thing.

While I generally a fan of Wikipedia as a way to explain obscure terms people may not be familiar with, in this case I don’t think your linked article reflects a distinct concept worth seeking.

People in general are honest in their discussions. Asserting that you want to have a dedicated space for “intellectual honesty” asserts that it isn’t workable in the extant communities, and implies that the rest of us are being “intellectually dishonest” if we are “partisan” or do not pretend our beliefs do not affect how we state facts.

The internet writ large, and social media in particular, is neither a scientific journal nor academic forum nor business back-room. And biases always affect how we state facts.

Where we take each others points seriously, demonstrate we understand them, and then address them?

This isn’t how human discussions work, unfortunately. At least not outside of formal debate clubs.

Humans in general use language to understand or be understood. If you make an assertion and people “ignore” it by trolling, they are expressing that they have disdain for your position–which implies at least a coarse understanding of it.

I’ve found that essentially any place on the internet can lead to worthwhile discussions, if you simply practice the habits of ignoring the trolls and engaging with those who respond to you.

You say that like it’s a bad thing.

You wrote something. Ergo, you are a writer.

Whether or not anyone ever pays you for your art, that you choose to make something yourself is enough to earn the same title as Shakespeare, King, Rowling, Shatner, Stallone, or Myer. ~Selection chosen deliberately to have a range of quality.~

Keep writing until you have finished a story. Then revise it until you can read it without hating it. Then write something else.

Balancing the budget by collecting monies already owed and taxing social bads is a pretty damn good idea even if the whole “city owned grocery store” thing flops.

It isn’t worth running a candidate that can’t win just because they have a platform like what hasn’t won you the seat in living memory.

A bunch of Republican voters are disillusioned libertarians who want to be free to live their lives and would rather government work effectively if it’s going to exist at all. Mamdani style socialists who run government like a grown up have at least as good a chance as some empty suit who votes with dems but talks like a republican.

“Screen Time” doesnt harm children in any measurable way.

“Chatting with an LLM” or “playing a freemium gatcha game” may, but simply playing with an electronic device isn’t implicitly harmful. Scientists have looked at the data for years, and there’s simply no support for the latest pearl clutching over how technology changes childhood.

(A far stronger case can me made that smartphones are detrimental to computer literacy, but that’s a far different ball of cheese.)