• 1 Post
  • 110 Comments
Joined 5 months ago
cake
Cake day: October 12th, 2024

help-circle






  • More than anything the trade embargo with DPRK needs to be lifted, same with Cuba

    Forgetting the DPRK for a sec, the Cuba comment is right, right? AFAICT the main reason the US embargoes Cuba is because Florida is a swing state and lifting the embargo would piss off the Cuban-American voters who hate Castro with a burning passion.

    In other words, shitty politics.



  • They disrupted the status quo back in 2003 (2001?), then in 2009 they were doing Linux ports, then in ~2015 they were doing HTPC stuff (and also funding Linux graphic driver dev the entire time, Linux gaming in its current state would not exist without Valve), there was their Steam Machine experiment somewhere in there (it flopped but that doesn’t make it cost any less), then they were doing Steam Deck stuff. They’re still paying Linux graphic devs BTW.


  • Yeah, Steam is a monopoly, but 1) they’ve been a monopoly since forever and there hasn’t been a Comcast-ish disaster, and 2) more competition doesn’t seem to actually benefit us here but could potentially make things a lot worse.

    In principle, Steam is a Sword Of Damocles just like any other Monopoly. In practice, the alternatives are EA and Epic, no thank you (I know itch.io is a good competitor, but they don’t have any pull on AAA publishers so I don’t expect them to take the market if Steam implodes).

    Also, Valve is innovating in ways that nobody else seems willing to - not just their Linux ports (represent!), but also their attempts on HTPC gaming (which was unnecessarily a huge pain in the ass on PC, for no good reason) and their steam controller. And their portable PC gaming with the Steam deck (which to be fair GPD probably did first).

    All in all, I’m happy to pay the Steam tax for what they’re doing. I have no illusions that Epic Games Store would provide serious competition in terms of the goodies I want, because they already aren’t, and they’re still in their sweetheart phase.



  • PuddleOfKittenstoPublic Transport@slrpnk.netYes please
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    1 month ago

    Or “my town is small that’s why everything is far apart”

    Everything is far apart because the streets are too wide. This dates back to the 1780s, it’s actually older than cars, and it was what made people adopt cars in the first place - for instance, Manhattan already had its car-sized streets of their current size way, way before cars were invented.

    In the long term, the problem is the street grid itself - squish everything closer together and everything will be nicer to walk to (because it’s human-scale), closer to walk to in the first place, and cheaper to maintain.


  • PuddleOfKittenstoPublic Transport@slrpnk.netYes please
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    1 month ago

    The electric trams were bad, because they were never actually intended as transport - the electric companies just wanted an excuse to hook the neighbourhoods up to electricity, and electric trams were just their excuse for doing so. It wasn’t cohesively designed, they didn’t necessarily think it was better than cars.

    Note that saying they were bad is not the same as saying they had to be bad - they were just poorly executed because they didn’t give a shit.