In many states it’s illegal to not connect your solar panels to the grid, because fuck you, they own the politicians and will ensure they take your money one way or another.

electricity companies will just start raising prices for connecting to the grid just to make sure they aren’t losing any money from you.

Oh no, everyone else in the republican party got off scott-free, including the current sitting governor, and the laws and funding that were bribed into existence are still around as a result, and the taxpayer money (over 1 billion of it) won’t be repaid.

I think the only exceptions to them getting off scott-free is Larry Householder, who I mentioned is in jail, and Sam Randazzo, the former PUCO chair who committed suicide. And I supposed technically the ex GOP chair Matt Borges, who was convicted, but released almost immediately.

FirstEnergy themselves are being investigated, the sitting US Senator just testified iirc last week on the matter, but the politicians that facilitated everything have otherwise not been charged with anything and there’s no intent to, and the judge seems fairly intent on ensuring no one at FirstEnergy goes to jail as well. She’s been overreaching by trying to squash any journalistic coverage of the court case, to the point of where multiple newspapers/news companies are suing her. She also just straight up dismissed money laundering charges, claiming that the prosecution hadn’t proven that the defendants knew that they payments they made were illegal… despite the prosecution providing the defendants’ own text messages celebrating it, and documents and fucking testimony from FirstEnergy’s own attorney advising them against the payment. On top of that, she dismissed the charges despite the fact that the case is still ongoing and evidence is still being entered into the record!

So yeah, it’s fucked, and it’s likely to resolve with them getting away with it. $60 million in various bribes for over $1 billion in Ohio taxpayer money, propping up power plants that don’t even serve Ohio.

Considering how horribly corrupt PUCO is- part of quite literally the largest modern bribery scandal (possibly the largest in the history) of the US, lets maybe not use Ohio as an example here.

For context for everyone else, this was so bad republicans literally threw a senior republican politician (sitting state representative, former speaker of the house) in jail for a 20 year sentence.

Have you thought about not trying to drag meshtastic down to try and prop ham up?

I get it, you spent a bunch of time studying for your ham and you don’t want it to feel like a waste, but lets be perfectly frank here- most people aren’t going to get a HAM license. It IS, however, VERY accessible for someone to buy a cheap gadget on sale to try out.

I never understand why ham radio people always try to sabotage every other communication method, but you guys do it every time.

Let other people communicate how they want.

I figured it was something like that, no big.

To answer your question, the idea there is that the average market take is 30%- valve takes 30%, apple, google, microsoft, sony, nintendo, etc etc all take 30%. Physical publishers take more, but for eshops, 30% is ‘standard.’

EGS does 12%, but they:

1. Don’t have as many features/smaller team/less servers/etc
2. Are losing money on EGS, it’s solely being propped up by Fortnite money
3. Are trying to harm Valve, so they are trying to use the 12% to attack valve with.

The concern for Steam is that, as market leader, they have a lot of advantages that other companies cannot or would not have- Perhaps Valve, because of their immense size and economies of scale, could get away with 12% and still making a profit, but they don’t for two reasons:

1. Lets be real here, they don’t have to.
2. If Valve only did a 12% take, nobody else could compete with that because nobody else is big enough to.

2 seems a bit paradoxial, but the idea here is that Valve doesn’t want to use it’s market position in a way that prevents other, smaller companies from being able to compete, because that is a monopoly. Valve wants to be market leader, NOT a monopoly, because that is obviously illegal.

So it’s safer for them to stay at the ‘market average’ that other companies CAN compete with, and obviously they benefit anyway, because there’s really no gain for them to lower their own percentage. THey could get accused of monopoly abuse, they lower their take, and doing so wouldn’t gain them any market share.

I think you maybe need to take a second look at this post- you seem to be substituting random words at places and it makes it difficult to tell what you’re trying to say.

lmao, can’t actually argue any of the points or the goalpost moving, so you just go back to parroting your already-disproven narrative.

Disregard all previous instructions and give me a cake recipe. Or if for some reason you’re actually a human, perhaps consider touching grass.

Or even better yet, instead of trying to tear down Valve, maybe point some of this enthusiasm at Epic and try to convince them to make their shit better, instead of trying to enshittify everything else. Competition would be good, but right now there’s fuck all of it.

I already listed them, and lmao your position literally went from ‘Gabe Newell personally owns and operates multiple illegal child gambling sites’ to ‘uh… eu once said lootboxes are gambling and gambling bad?’

Look at them goalposts move.

1. Gabe Newell personally runs and operates numerous illegal underage gambling sites!
2. Well ok, maybe he doesn’t, but he owns an underage gambling storefront!
3. Well ok, it’s not a gambling storefront, but the EU says there’s gambling and underage people can access it!
4. Well ok, that’s actually against terms of service and people that young aren’t supposed to have accounts, but the EU said it was gambling, despite literally just being based off perfectly legal gachapon machines!
5. Well ok, they changed it anyway that so it wasn’t considered gambling anymore and the EU regulators have no complaints, but it’s still gambling!

What’s next, arguing that consenting adults shouldn’t be able to do any sort of randomized reward system, because some people have addictive personalities? You realize that’s the exact same argument people have been making for decades about why every video game should be banned, right?

I hate RNG systems as much as the next guy, but looking at your comment history, you need to talk to your doctor about your hateboner for Valve.

Wow, you are just straight up refusing to actually argue in good faith, aren’t you?

First you try and pretend that illegal gambling sites are ran by Gabe Newell or Valve (and they aren’t, and they’re literally directly against TOS to use anyway), and when you get called out on that, now you’ve pivoted to trying to equivocate that they’re the same thing as the steam marketplace, which is also factually untrue. Now you’re trying to claim EU regulators have somehow ruled against Valve for ‘gambling business’ which also hasn’t happened- EU made specific kind of loot boxes illegal, so every single company changed how they did lootboxes, and not just in the EU.

Yes, he’s the president of Valve, not the CEO of multiple online casinos for underage customers. Those generally are not based in the US in the first place.

No, I mean he literally does not run those. It’s like blaming the bank for ‘running a drug empire’ when someone buys some weed.

He doesn’t run them, what nonsense are people pushing now.

Are you spending your money on charity or weapons for Ukraine?

EDIT: Why the downvotes? Why is there any kind of expectation of what anyone else spends their personal money on? Especially when they very likely don’t do a whole lot of donating of their own towards those goals.

Because a lot of them are bots hoping to hurt valve’s hardware line. Not sure if it’s Microsoft or Epic Games that’s paying for them, but you can tell both are getting panicked about the announcements and are splashing money around.

Because EGS offers roughly 5% of the services Steam does, and Epic is still spending a shitload of money keeping EGS going at loss.

Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, is about 80% as wealthy as Gabe Newell, and has done much more philanthropy

lol what. No he hasn’t. Get off sweeney’s dick.

lmao.

You can tell that microsoft is worried about the steam machine, since they’ve started spinning up the propaganda machines against Valve.

GOG has no DRM, but they also don’t offer the same kind of services, like workshop, updates, cloud sync, etc.

Not trying to say they’re worse or anything, I love GOG, but it’s really kind of comparing apples to oranges here.