I mean, that’s partly true. From my keeping up with politics, some of the candidates actions are their own but about 80% of the job is what you described. Your party recommends actions to you and congress sets you up for most of your actions. Vetoing things is only common when the opposition holds congress.

I’ll highlight though that lately the presidents have seized more and more power and continue to do so. It started with Bush basically declaring war without congress and lately it’s been Biden doing things like canceling student loans and blocking the border up. Which I get that’s all power they’ve always had, but they’ve been reluctant to use it improperly because it’s so abusable. Now those robes are off and so trump will come into office and immediately write laws by himself basically

My prediction is that one of them doesn’t make it to Inauguration Day and the country panics as a result. Is likely? No. But on this timeline it makes the most sense

I swear that Bethesda tries as hard as possible to mess up everything they do. There’s not much hope left for them so we just have to twiddle our thumbs and wait till they release Elder Scrolls 6, receive more awful reviews and outrage, and then get gobbled up entirely by Microsoft.

Okay so in plain terms (from what I can tell) they’re arguing that Spotify isn’t paying them enough because they have product A and product B. A bundle of A and B has their prices raised but only costs a dollar more than product A with its costs raised. So they’re arguing that they deserve a larger part of product A since B clearly isn’t adding much value to their platform.

Then additionally they claim that by offering product B as a standalone subscription, the price they’re setting for product B only serves to allow Spotify to pay them less for A in those bundles.

This makes sense because it’s a good way to reduce the money paid to the music side of the business by inserting new things into their services and then claiming that the new rate increases are due to that new service (that they don’t have to pay out as much to audio book companies for).

There’s a fan made mod for the original, but HL2 has official RTX support I believe

I bet they’re thinking about covering up a big political scandal before an election with an illegal hush money payment. Or maybe they’ll scheme to use fake electors to prevent the verification of the election. Maybe target the vice president to use political power incorrectly. Or maybe they’ll break into our capital building to stop the election from being verified. Or maybe they’ll promote Russian misinformation campaigns.

Anyone who thinks they won’t be interfering in the election is bananas. They’ll start declaring it fake and rigged a full 2-3 months before it even takes place and the Russian bots will help them do it.

Wouldn’t say completely. The notice of intent to sell is not there to prevent CEOs from selling when they want to, it’s to notify you that they could sell this much if they wanted to.

The purpose is just to say that you need to be prepared for a potential sale. If the CEO keeps backing out of a sale, that does hurt your ability to predict when they will but not how much they could sell and therefore how much those sales could potentially affect your investment.

All of that is strategic because otherwise investors could conceivably do the opposite and sell before the CEO is forced to sell and then buy his shares at a lower price. That would mean the stock would tank every time the CEO went to sell. The problem exists because most of the solutions are even worse

They’re reporting 1.00 billion in gross profit as of Q1 2024 so yeah, they make money. It’s kind of impossible to compare much though since they’re the only freestanding music competitor that’s popular.

The closest comparison I can make is using Apples reported figures of making around $9.2 billion in revenue for its 93 million user base.

Meanwhile Spotify is making around 2.63 billion in revenue for its near 3x subscriber base estimated around 240 million. So I wouldn’t say they’re not making money, but maybe you can see why they think they can squeeze a lot more. Best to just unsubscribe honestly, they’ll keep doing this

Alternate theory: The human brain is reacting to unfamiliarity and not alien features. We strongly associate Uncanny Valley with things not-quite human but it’s my thinking that it’s a tribal thing. Nowadays we see a ton of faces of all variations but I bet when we were hunter gatherers, we only saw features of our own tribe. The moment you meet another tribe, I’d bet this response is to create fear of the unrecognized human. It’s also probably there as a punishment mechanism for us seeing faces in everything.

The times that the uncanny effect hit hardest is when you think something is human or is a face potentially before finding out you’re wrong. So that’s my basis for thinking its there to keep us from being mistaken.

Good points on the saturation thing. My experience in the vr space is that most companies aim right at the middle of all of those goals and fail as a result. The price ends up lower, but not low enough. Software is supported, but not enough. Software is targeted but then turns out underfunded.

In my opinion, Sony should have created a headset targeting $300-$400 and then focused not on just making random good VR games but play off of existing titles.

The reason that works so well is that many people have a favorite PS5 game, why not offer 3D models viewable in VR? Or the maps? Or a shot minigame mode with small bits of content for a low price? These things are relatively cheap to do but have a huge impact on gamers wanting to get into VR.

Resident evil is a great example of this. The Horizon game less so. Either way, use those titles all the time to your advantage. Try to get a VR camera mode in more 3rd person games. Promote VR movies and streaming maybe.

You still have this issue though of pivoting out of a catch-22. No software, no gamers, no money, so no software or hardware. The way to break out of that is by maintaining a library of games and adding to it over time as adopters get on board. This is why them ditching PSVR1 killed the second headset. Build that library to a tipping point like SteamVR and Meta are working on, don’t abandon it.

Sony could’ve done a lot of things to help this push honestly and they did nothing. It’s like none of these companies even know how to exist in experimental spaces anymore and it shows big time.

Well even then, if the content was there, people would buy it even at its ridiculous price. You have to consider there is a massive amount of PlayStation users so if only 1% of their playerbase has enough money for this, that’s still a ton of people compared to current VR numbers.

So I stand by saying the price is a barrier, but not a problem or dealbreaker. The real issue is just that PSVR1 people are no longer getting support, PSVR2 has few games since they don’t include the previous library. And why buy a PSVR2 if you know they’re going to lock your games into that specific headset? Sony put all that money into hardware and has zero idea how to exist in markets that aren’t already growing, so this was inevitable

I mean I think VR has a bright future but it won’t be until Meta can gain some serious traction with their headsets that we get some really good games on other platforms.

Now Meta would assume this is a win but they’re just going to generate temporary traction for themselves and then people will move elsewhere as Valve and Sony are better at both software and hardware. They’re letting Meta do the expensive part, the R&D, for them. Then all of these players plan to swoop in and steal their business. You’ll watch it happen in 6-10 years.

I really wish that people would pile on Sony for not having PSVR1 games be compatible with the second headset. I would consider buying their headset just for PCVR and the entire PSVR1 library plus the PSVR2 stuff. At that point if you also own a PS5 like I do, that opens up a lot of games and rivals what Meta is doing.

I think PSVR2 is dead in the water unless Sony invests a lot into it. Great PC headset but otherwise no. I really think Meta is doing an okay job with their library, so if you aren’t super worried about Meta having personal data on you, bite the bullet there. Otherwise you’ll be stuck with the stagnant SteamVR offerings which only have a worthwhile longer experience a couple times a year.

Most people may have just wanted a less crap version of Reddit, but how you make Reddit less crap is that you spread out the moderation and also don’t grow power in admins. That’s what federation (mostly) does. I just think we need a way to transfer a user and also to load multiple profiles.

I also don’t understand why federation needs to be the way it is. I feel like instances could present a “read-only” version of themselves to defederated instances so that users could at least read the posts but not interact.

This is exactly why I think Valve is primed to bring Steam Machines back. They’re already working on making a full functioning Linux OS, Steam OS. They have a huge library of games that regularly go on sale that you can now play on a handheld. Your save games sync across platform. Your Steam Machine would support existing controllers from either Xbox or PlayStation. I mean at this point they would be silly NOT to make them again.

This is probably partially true but just to note that there’s a lot of factors at play here. Since prices have risen on all items, what is more likely is that the prices are due to manufacturing companies raising them.

We know that’s true from the government reports, so what target is doing here makes sense. Their volume has become low enough that their margin isn’t making them money. Which is why they increased prices in the first place to try and maintain that margin. Now they want to increase volume on their own products which have higher margin (they don’t have to share) so the prices are guaranteed to be lower.

This is what we expect of late stage capitalism where most of the grocery store is effectively owned by a small handful of companies (J&J,P&G,General Mills, Tyson, etc.) and the only people able to compete with them are the grocery stores themselves.

The budget options still aren’t there to help you, but these options will represent the bottom of the market. And since they rely on the consumer choosing the value brand instead, they need to have volume of sales to work. And as we know, that means these products will always be nearer to the cheapest possible price.

Last note is important: if you observe that even the discount brand prices are beginning to become unaffordable for you and you represent an average consumer, your economy is already failing

What’s funny is that it’s also probably an internal security risk as well. I mean who knows, there’s probably at least one of their internal servers that still accepts credentials or keys from the dead domain. Not to mention their emails probably aren’t transferred.

All of that could be fixed but you’d have to, ya know, not fire your programmers.

Who are all these people Jerry?

It seems that steam pulls refunds directly revenue in most cases which means that the publishers and studios feel an immediate impact in their numbers from them.

Valve may choose to absorb some of the refunds but I don’t see why they would. Sony made the games unplayable in certain regions while telling Steam they wanted the game sold in those exact regions beforehand. They misused the store and I’m sure they paid dearly for it with those refunds.

These companies are obsessed with money. The money they lost on refunds forced by Steam is the punishment.