It's ok to be angry about capitalism

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BrawlMan

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So how is the so called god king 'president' and his bitches gonna fix their fuck ups?



 

tstorm823

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So how is the so called god king 'president' and his bitches gonna fix their fuck ups?



Prolly just wait 48 hours and do nothing and the problem fixes itself.
 

Agema

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Some people in the UK are fucking stupid for doing this.​
The man who made that video is a fucking idiot. Sorry, but he is.

Right out of the gate he identifies the problem: is Steam potentially a monopoly? At the simplest level, he identifies that Steam has a market share that is very definitely the territory of a company that can exert monopoly power. He then proceeds to make a series of arguments that are transparently shit and mostly fail to address potential concerns in a meaningful way.

There are major concerns that Amazon has monopoly powers for online sales, Apple and Google operate monopolistic powers on mobile phone app downloads, Meta acts a monopolist via Facebook/Instagram, etc. These are all companies that have been brought to court by regulators or users in recent years, some found guilty. If we look at what they have done, can do and how they got there, we can very much see elements of that, or the potential for it, in Steam.

Now, what I will grant him is that Steam is probably not a monopolist. But he's an utter, fucking, complacent idiot for thinking it's stupid to even test the case.
 
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BrawlMan

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Still doesn't make sense why Steam is getting sued. The guy in the video might be wrong with some things, but that is the overall point everybody is noticing right out of the gate. This feels like a waste of time. Especially with that whole "Steam does the 30 percent cut" thing, even though it's the exact same for digital stores like PSN, MS Store, and eShop.
 
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Satinavian

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I won't say that Steam will lose the suit or that the alleged damages were reasonable. Or that this was not just some opportunistic attempt to extract money without good reason.

However Steam is powerful enough to be open to such attacks based on monopoly laws. If Steam didn't exist yet but would be the prospected result of a fusion of smaller stores, such a fusion would likely be denied as too big and dominant.

I still hope Steam wins this.
 
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Agema

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Especially with that whole "Steam does the 30 percent cut" thing, even though it's the queen's exact same for digital stores like PSN, MS Store, and eShop.
Sure. And I can point out that historically one reason companies sometimes all charged the same is because they formed an illegal cartel and fixed the price.

Or alternatively, if it's a free and competitive market, why would this not be an area they compete against each other, do they all have exactly the same costs that they need the same cut to make their money? Isn't it actually weird that they are all 30%?

It might be an "industry standard". And it might not be!
 
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BrawlMan

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they formed an illegal cartel and fixed the price.

Or alternatively, if it's a free and competitive market, why would this not be an area they compete against each other, do they all have exactly the same costs that they need the same cut to make their money? Isn't it actually weird that they are all 30%?

It might be an "industry standard". And it might not be!
I didn't say it was right, but if this small group of whoever from the UK are gonna sue Steam for it, then they might as well do the same for all the other digital stores. Epic included. Though I can already tell they're not doing it for the "good of the people", and just in it for the money in their own selfish reasons.

Steam is not perfect but people go to it because they treat the developers and their customers and user base right. Not to mention they're pretty lenient with refunds, and give people chances if their game doesn't work for whatever reason. I've gotten at least three different ones from Steam, and I got those refunds back fast.

Yet MS, eShop, and PSN rather not or not without difficulties and making it at one time thing. So so whoever's doing this lawsuit can fuck off.
 
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Silvanus

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Steam is incredibly dominant in the PC gaming market.

Now it doesn't abuse this power noticibly. But it probabyly could.
It doesn't actively abuse its position. But nor does it exercise the responsibility that comes with holding a position that dominant. It allows non-functional, abusive, or borderline-scam products to infest its platform through a lack of moderation.
 
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Gergar12

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If you use any self-driving mode, and treat it as anymore than a slightly better cruise control mode, your an idiot. They should be paying people to use it even with LIDAR which Tesla don't have. My dad's a fan of Tesla but won't go anywhere near the self-driving mode.
 

Agema

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If you use any self-driving mode, and treat it as anymore than a slightly better cruise control mode, your an idiot. They should be paying people to use it even with LIDAR which Tesla don't have. My dad's a fan of Tesla but won't go anywhere near the self-driving mode.
Fundamentally, the way to handle automated drivers is that the company who make the system should have liability in case of accident. What I suspect is actually going to happen is that the system will be rigged so that liability falls on the car owner/user's insurance. And thus the price of automated driver systems will be artificially cushioned from and fail to reflect their potential for harm.

For instance, Musk mocks Waymo because it's much more expensive to run that Tesla. (Note that Waymo also employs Filipinos to do work as some sort of live remote driver assist in a way that's not clear.) But Waymo seems to have a substantially better safety record than Tesla. If society were to properly bill Tesla for all the additional accidents it causes relative to Waymo, would Tesla still be cheaper?

And also, we need to bear in mind that Tesla has a huge amount of information about crashes, but it won't release them. We don't even know in many cases to what extent Teslas have maimed and killed their passengers, because Tesla won't say and authorities don't demand the data to scrutinise. Tesla claim in many cases that the human had control of the car at the point of impact, but some leaks or evidence suggests that this is a trick: the automated driver has ceded control of the car to the human a split-second before the crash occurred, when it was too late to prevent. We cannot trust these companies to mark their own homework.
 
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Schadrach

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What I suspect is actually going to happen is that the system will be rigged so that liability falls on the car owner/user's insurance. And thus the price of automated driver systems will be artificially cushioned from and fail to reflect their potential for harm.
You are responsible for what you do in your vehicle, and every one of those automated systems has the capability to assert control from them immediately essentially at will. In the system we have, a bad automated driving system would have worse safety metrics than a human driver and as a consequence vehicles with it would increase your insurance premiums correspondingly because the data would reflect that. It would take something like it being demonstrated that Tesla released an automated driving system it knew was flawed negligently to make Tesla directly financially responsible for it.

But the other side of that is that humans are generally bad at driving, so it's not going to be too far in the future to produce an automated driving system that is less dangerous than a human driver in typical conditions, and perhaps give it the sensors to identify atypical conditions and refuse to operate under them.
 

Agema

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But the other side of that is that humans are generally bad at driving, so it's not going to be too far in the future to produce an automated driving system that is less dangerous than a human driver in typical conditions, and perhaps give it the sensors to identify atypical conditions and refuse to operate under them.
Whilst there's a lot you can question about who is collecting and analysing data and how, and whether Waymo is actually operating in the same range of driving conditions as humans do, studies suggest Waymo is already safer than a human by 50-90%.

There are however interesting questions that can be asked about liability. One of which is fault: for instance, run into the back of someone (assuming they didn't do some dick move) and the driver behind is liable. But this sort of liability potentially becomes much harder to justify with automated drivers. Maybe in the new world, the insurance bill just needs to be split.

Then there's another issue. Let's say Tesla is cheaper than Waymo but more likely to cause a crash. How do we deal with this? Does there need to be a penalty applied to Tesla? Tesla can undercut Waymo in sales just by being cheaper, but if this doesn't reflect the cost of crashes then we end up with a less safe automated driver system dominating. In fact, we probably end with a "race to the bottom" where the automated driver systems try to undercut each other as much as possible at the expense of safety.
 
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