Physical retailers have been taking 30% before steam was even a thing. And no, the physical storage does not mean they should be paid more, because steam provides hosting capabilities that also cost money. Console stores from limited research seem to also take 30%.

Epic takes less because they operate the store at a loss in a desperate attempt to gain market share. If ms takes less, it’s for the same reason.

I rarely drink, I don’t smoke, I don’t have a car, my apartment is 40m^2 because that’s all I need, I pay <750€/month including utilities. Around 150€/month go to a private retirement fund with an insurance company. After other regular expenses, if I don’t make any purchases, I can save 1000€ a month. Realistically I do make purchases, so it’s more like 500 - 700€. I generally split that between my savings account and etfs (as retirement fund), and try to not let my savings account go below a certain point.

I make ~2800€/month net salary. Depending on where you live, it’s entirely possible your base expenses are much higher, not having a car might not be a real option, rent might be insane etc. But as someone else said, lifestyle creep. You get used to luxuries and suddenly all your money is gone for “things you need”. If I want something new that will lead to regular expenses, I try to examine if there’s anything else I could really just do without that I can stop paying for. Sometimes I also just look at subscriptions etc. to see if I forgot about anything.

Complaining about the 30% is insanity, that’s how retailers work, it’s not an unusual cut for an online store.

I fail to see how steam is anti-consumer, or how it ever actively tried to monopolize anything.

Selling broken, unfinishedband shovelware games was just them giving in to the demand to let everything on the store, after people (rightfully imo) hated greenlight.

Fuck the gambling though

I forgot where but some time in the last 3 hours I read that the goal for steamOS is to be supported on all PCs, though it’s an ongoing effort.

Arch is hard if you don’t like reading documentation and doing basic troubleshooting. Which is perfectly valid.

If you don’t mind that or even enjoy learning things that way, arch is the nicest experience possible.

If my understanding of the legislative EU process is somewhat correct, this effectively leaves it up to the countries to decide (as EU laws just mean that countries have to pass a law enacting it).

It’s not rare to phrase laws this way in germany at least. It’s not necessarily bad, as it allows court interpretation to change alongside societal values. In this case it would likely lead to only some countries actually passing mass surveillance laws (it’s pretty unambiguously unconstitutional in a bunch, which makes it clear that mass surveillance is not “reasonable”. Not that that always stops legislators, but it would at least die before the highest court eventually).

So we still need to fight it, because it’s the first line of defense. Really what we need to push for would likely be explicitly disallowing blanket scanning of communication on the EU level, or proposals like this will happen again and again.

Even if we set our global net emissions to 0 right now it’s not gonna get colder again in our lives or the lives of the next 100 generations. The carbon was in the ground, we burnt it, now it’s in the atmosphere as co2. To get it back down, we need negative net emissions aka co2 recapture.

And needless to say, getting our global net emissions anywhere close to 0 isn’t even really in reach for the next 50 years, so if we can do recapture alongside reducing emissions that would probably be great. Particularly in the wealthy western nations that might reach at least nominal net 0 at some point in this century.

Looking at the response to the gaza invasion, it seems rather than learning to recognize fascism, people learned only to recognize the specific ww2 era german version of it and use that as criteria to recognize fascism as a whole.

You agree hitler was a piece of shit, so you can’t be a fascist. You think israel should exist, so you can’t be a fascist. You think israel’s actions are horrific, you must be a nazi. Etc.

Don’t (most) transmen inject/otherwise take testosterone? That would be doping if a cis man did it. So I do think there’s an argument there (not really any better than the argument against transwomen in women’s sports, in both cases imo hormone levels just need to be monitored and you can have pretty much equal competition).

I also think at the top level it’s not entirely invalid to say you don’t want people with heavily modified bodies competing. Anything that isn’t either the global top level or professional I find it completely ridiculous though, the level is just so wildly variant that any tiny advantage potentially gained from that is negligible anyway.

But also everything I know about the science behind it tells me trans athletes are completely fine (in trans womens case after some minimum time or HRT) because as it turns out hormones kinda determine everything about your body.

Etymology is the why, really. For example the german word for floor (in this context), Stockwerk, comes from “putting something on top”. So it would make no sense at all to call the ground floor the 1. Stockwerk. It is usually labelled E for Erdgeschoss (=ground floor) though and not 0.

No, because the game does not support linux, so I never paid for it to work on linux. The fact that most games do anyway, usually out of the box and without any issues, is largely thanks to valve.

Tbh I don’t really get why though. Clearly he’s good at getting people to listen, but… why?

Hitler was similar (except I’d say better looking) but listening to his speeches I at least get how he had crowds cheering. Trump could say things I agree with and I’d still not want to listen to him.

If the dev doesn’t opt to implement steams drm, you can also just run the exe. Downloading it requires the client vs. GOG allowing you to dl the game from their website, but that’s about the only difference (GOG outright refusing any games with DRM is incredibly based though and a great reason to buy on GOG over steam)

And that can be quite helpful. Just yesterday I had a game that wouldn’t launch via steam, but for some reason worked fine if I just ran it as an executable via protontricks.

Steam also offers DRM, it’s just up to devs to use it. And steams DRM is relatively unintrusive.

I think steam should maybe be in the middle, and the other 2 far on the left.

Aside from this not being true because “openly fash far right” and “corporate bought center right” are not the same even though both suck:

They’re the same. An election system that allows for more than 2 parties inherently encourages more diversity between the parties.

I thought it was specifically about words with long e sounds? So “Keith” would be an exception (but it’s a name and those are always weird - though “weird” itself is a better example), but most of the stuff on the mug it never meant to apply to. And overall for long e sounds it applies far more often than not. Ultimately english spelling will always be a clusterfuck though.

And I sure wish people would stop spelling wiener as weiner. The city is called Wien ffs.

I’ve thought about this a bunch. The christian god being omnipotent and benevolent is contradictory to the bible and also just the state of the world. So what if there actually is some god (or multiple) but these entities are far from omnipotent, really can’t meddle all that much and maybe don’t really care in the first place.

I don’t think it’s true (even if it seems more plausible than any religion actually being completely right) but it’s just funny to me to imagine that all religions could just be the result of some higher dimensional beings playing with our planet out of boredom, and humans just ascribed far too much power to them.

It is because no one present likely has anything to do with the decision, and even if someone is actively restraining you there’s a reasonable amount of resistance and while that includes mild violence it does not include shooting someone or similar. Unless you really need to be somewhere reacting to that with extreme violence is completely unhinged.

Maybe mild violence is what you meant, but that can easily be read differently.

The one way gates are standard, the only exit being ticket scan isn’t. The change is supposedly only the one way gates, so they’re half truthing to pretend it’s normal.

I first looked up porn online around that age and never had that kind of image of sex at any point. No idea if that’s due to my personality, the fact that I read a lot of people’s perspectives online which told me porn is unrealistic, or just that I had plenty of idea what sex was about at 13 because of course I had questions before then and any answer I got emphasized the part where both parties involved enjoy it and love each other.

Maybe a bit of all of them. But I really think that while trying to restrict porn access for minors a little more than an “are you 18” pop-up is probably a good thing, it needs to be without violating any adult’s privacy and the main way to prevent damage is and always will be better education.