The plan is only for very rich and poor people to exist.

Public Works is a net-generator of revenue for a municipality. They allow businesses to operate, which increases tax revenue.

The alternative to hiring people to shovel the snow is having business halt and the city taking a massive loss in tax revenue, to say nothing of the social, economic, and public safety benefits.

Hundreds of things that cost tens of thousands of dollars versus thousands of things that costs hundreds of thousands a year.

You’re literally saying that Steam’s server costs are orders of magnitude less than Gamestop’s retail store location costs.

I went backstage at the Dolisney World Aquarium as part of a Scuba experience, and they said they didn’t have any say on whether the cetaceans on exhibit stayed or were released to the wild. They were all animals that had been injured at sea and were there for recovery, and a third-party decided if they stayed or went.

There was one manatee there they expected to keep for life because it always either rode on other animals or propelled itself by pushing off walls.

They gave no grace period and invalidated licenses during elections.

I’ve worked in retail and in tech. Tech infrastructure is expensive, but they save a metric fuckton by not requiring physical space. You could fit the entirety of all of valve’s Tech infrastructure in a single building. Of course, they don’t do that - they have it distributed in data centers all over the world. But they are renting space in server racks, whereas Gamestop is renting thousands of retail spaces for 100 grand a year, another 100 grand each on staffing them, and a metric fuckton on inventory. And their cut of the sales is tiny.

People saying they charge 30% are wrong. Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo charge 30%. Gamestop’s margin on a new game is like 10-15 percent. They make more on used games, but only if they sell. Their 100% markup on used games versus what they pay doesn’t mean as much when lots of those games go unsold. At least new games can be returned to the manufacturer.

Not 10 times the employees. 10 times the nunber of stores as Valve has employees.

Let’s look at the cost of just floor-level associates. If Gamestop employees made an average of $14 an hour and they have 2 employees working and were open 11 hours a day an average (standard is 10am to 9pm - they actually work shorter hours on Sunday, but there’s also time spent opening and closing the store and extra hours on holidays other than Christmas, so 11 is low). That comes out to over 100 grand per store just in nominal hourly wages for floor associates.

Valve would have to pay 7 figures on average per employee to have the same staffing cost as Gamestop’s lowest-paid employees.

You know what it costs to run a retail store? And even in 2025 GameStop had 10 times as many retail store locations as Valve had employees.

And it’s not like retail has no tech infrastructure expenses.

College degrees demonstrate you can complete a long-term project with disparate, often competing priorities handed down from separate departments while meeting deadlines and milestones.

30% makes sense for a physical store with high overhead, inventory, staffing, and other expenses.

Valve could take a 5% cut and still make a ton more than a retail store for the same product.

I’m not sure where I stand there. Steam is a great platform, but for purely capitalistic reasons. The only reason they aren’t as bad as other platforms is because they’re privately-owned and take the long view because they don’t have to worry about the day-to-day fluctuations on stock value.

Gabe isn’t your friend. He’s a billionaire yacht-collector who makes the vast majority of his money by taking a massive cut from other company’s products because of their virtual monopoly that exists because they launched an online marketplace in 2004.

Yeah, but then they tried going all woke in the late 90s with the CD-RW stuff and data reassignment procedures.

Reality?

Hey - some of their food is alright, and the service has generally been excellent any time I’ve eaten there. As long as those 2 things remain true, I don’t really care how they dress.

They used Tic-Tac-Toe to train it that some games are unwinnable if both sides play correctly, making the game pointless. Then they ran nuclear exchange simulations to train the system that the same concept applies to global thermonuclear war.

Except in that one the AI learned that endless escalation is bad.

“The only winning move is not to play.”

Within a week of the killing, BCBS backed out on some of their upcoming bullshit and United Heathcare’s pre-authorization rejection rate has decreased dramatically in the aftermath.

Thimpson’s death (at the hands of someone whose identity we’ll never know for sure) was objectively good for the insured.

A box is typically between 20 and 50 rounds.

Less than a case though.

Don’t worry. They’ll have clear instructions on how to vote posted on the wall of the voting precinct on Tuesdays between 12 and 12:30 starting 15 days before the election.

Just throw hard enough to trigger fusion reaction then.