It’s funny because it wasn’t closed by force, it was closed by nervous insurance companies, by companies not wanting to move their ships through if they’re not insured.

Like Iran isn’t patrolling it with some blockade, sinking any ship that dares run it. In fact they haven’t sunk a single ship as far as I know. They’ve just made it clear that they still pose a risk to any ship that passes And that theoretical risk is enough to spook insurance companies and stop ships.

That’s a big part of why the conversation about soybean based biofuel is suddenly in the news. Lot of farmers want to keep growing soy because it is relatively easy and hands off (as much as things can be in farming at least) but the demand is gone, so they need the government to step in and invent a new demand by subsidizing the purchase of soybeans for diesel.

The funny part is, the deals where other countries bought US soybeans as animal feed were a multi decade diplomatic effort by the US government to solve this issue. Those were not deals that just naturally arose because American soy was so cheap or good or anything, they were major foreign policy objective pursued for the sake of maintaining domestic soybean prices at the behest of farmers.

Yah, see, thing is, multigenerational wealth cosplaying as farmers need to grow something that at least breaks even on their financalized property assets, otherwise those assets wouldn’t be “farm land” and would get taxed differently.

if you crush out the oil, the biodiesel, you’re still left with a significant mass of protein and carbs, the carbs are what you would want for making ethanol.

The protein? Uh, not really useful for fuel. like maybe there is some specialized microorganism that could metabolize that to make ethanol or something? Probably it would just get tossed after the starches were fermented out of the solids. Normally it’d just get fed to animals, but the reason we’re even talking about alternative uses for soy is because the foreign animal feed market has collapsed because of an idiot old mans atavistic urges.

Microsoft was not declared a monopolist because of their dominant market position in operating system space.

They were declared a monopolist because they used that market position to actively disincentive the use of competitor’s browsers, beyond “just including a browser”, but actively doing things to make other browsers difficult to download and use on their operating system.

Apple is not declared a monopolist because they do not own and control chrome, the really dominant market player derived from WebKit, and apple are not using some dominant market position to enforce that.

If you see things differently and think the same logic as these cases could be applied to steam, go ahead and contact epic’s legal department.

Buying a new copy of every games I play regularly (say 2-10 hours every 6 months) would be nearly a months rent for me.

Even if you only have like 2 games your play regularly, you shouldn’t have to pay for them again. You already payed for them.

When you “add a game” to the steam library, you’re just creating a link to another file on your system, not really shifting the management of it over to steam (so no updates or the like), and if you logged in on another machine you wouldn’t be able to download the game through steam.

more importantly you can’t take a steam game and move over your license to use it, or ability to install/update it to some other platform. If you decided you never wanted to use steam again, that you liked some other platform better, you would still have to use steam to access any games you purchased there.

Edit: just an after thought to clarify my thinking on this. You payed to accesses that code. That series of instructions to be run on your computer. Everyone who worked to make it has been payed. If they don’t have money to keep maintaining it, they should stop doing that, or ask for further money to keep doing so. But if you want to just run the code you paid for already, it is absurd that someone restrict in what way you run a series of commands on your computer. It is indefensible, and corrosive to society.

What maintains Steam’s dominant market position is user lock in, not any policy they enforce or any monopoly laws they violate. The only thing that would break user lock in would be allowing migration of licenses for games between platforms, and making friend/multiplayer/mod-management systems interoperable across platforms.

Valve has made no effort to implement these kinds of systems. BUT NETHER HAS ANYONE ELSE. (Well except gog and DRM free games, but that’s only part of the issue.)

The fact that one privately owned company has such huge control of the industry is a huge risk, undeniably. But breaking up valve wouldn’t solve the problem, it would just let someone else take their place.

They don’t mandate price parity on other platforms. They mandate that people selling steam keys on different storefronts match price with the steam store. Which is to say, they allow people to distribute through steam’s infrastructure, without paying steam’s vendor fee, but not for a lower price.

Publishers can absolutely choose to sell for cheaper on EGS(or any other distribution platform for that matter), that they generally don’t is not due to some valve policy.

I mean it’s entirely possible they intimidated the kid in to confessing to a crime he didn’t commit.

The intent of the whole “We know you did it, we have lots of evidence, confess and we’ll go easy on you” shtick is that someone who didn’t do it would know they couldn’t have evidence and thus wouldn’t be pressured to confess by it. Problem is, most people know that cops plant, tamper and manufacture evidence constantly so it’s actually a pretty good way to intimidate people in to confessing to crimes they didn’t do.

The difference is that Reddit was still largely usable after the API changes and most affected users weren’t getting banned. Some people have a high tolerance for ads, but a lot of people would find YouTube unusable without an ad blocker, and if YouTube was banning people, they’d be destroying a lot of the inertia against going somewhere else.

If we say that something like 20% of users on YouTube are using adblockers, that’s a big enough addressable market for a competitor to seriously take off. Enough to attract content creators and VC funding to get it off the ground. In the end YouTube would probably win, but it would be after a few years of actually having to compete. The revenue loss over that time period isn’t worth the short term gain of getting some small percentage of users to watch ads.

If YouTube felt like it could get away with banning people using ad blockers and requiring an account to watch, they would have done it a decade ago.

I doubt they’ll ever actually do it, just threaten it constantly.

They’d rather have people without accounts, and/or using adblockers keep using the site. If they started actually cracking down, then it would create a significant pool of users who would use some other platform. They’d rather eat the losses of some people not viewing ads then push a significant amount of users to a potential competitor.

Much like how Microsoft hasn’t cracked down on unlicensed windows installs because it would push a significant amount of people to look for an alternative OS.

As long as it’s not inside the inner box where the tingle beams bounce around.

The issue is, his people have been selected based on their ability to tell him what he wants to hear, and that’s mirrored up and down the hierarchy. Everyone up and down the line is fudging what they can do or the reality of the situation, and that gets amplified as it travels up, and seemingly meaningful orders get diluted while traveling down.

Their understanding of their own capability and what options they have is massively distorted. They think they have more capacity and influence than they actually do, and what real power they do have will be poorly allocated when the time comes.

He and his people will absolutely try, and it’s going to create a bunch of messes, but, it’s like a toddler trying to fly a passenger jet, they can hit a bunch of buttons and switches, but the chances of that actually leading to the engines starting and the plane taking off are near 0.

Gee, maybe there might be some practical, social and legal problems with always recording camera glasses…

Not always. Black pepper contains Piperine which also effects the TRPV1 sensing protein like capsaicin, if a bit weaker. Horseradish, mustard and wasabi have Allyl isothiocyanate which affects TRPV1 but also TRPA1 which triggers pain cold and itching response, leading to coughing and tearing.

There are a fair amount of other compounds that effect the TRPV1 and plenty of other similar receptors.

Yes, this is why pepper spray sucks even if it doesn’t get in your mouth.

Spicy isn’t a taste or a smell, it is a sensation caused by the compounds lowering the threshold to activate of heat detecting nerves too below the ambient temperature of the human body. It’s basically making you burn your self.

Lots of other “flavors” are also like this, lowering the threshold of firing for certain sensory nerves. Sichuan pepper for instance, it lowers the threshold for movement sensing, causing the bizarre tingle waving sensation.

Those heat sensing compounds exist all over your body, not just in your mouth.

The reality is, that it’s often stated that generative AI is an inevitability, that regardless of how people feel about it, it’s going to happen and become ubiquitous in every facet of our lives.

That’s only true if it turns out to be worth it. If the cost of using it is lower than the alternative, and the market willing to buy it is the same. If the current cloud hosted tools cease to be massively subsidized, and consumers choose to avoid it, then it’s inevitably a historical footnote, like turbine powered cars, Web 3.0, and laser disk.

Those heavily invested in it, ether literally through shares of Nvidia, or figuratively through the potential to deskill and shift power away from skilled workers at their companies don’t want that to be a possibility, they need to prevent consumers from having a choice.

If it was an inevitability in it’s own right, if it was just as good and easily substitutable, why would they care about consumers knowing before they payed for it?

They’re about a 2/3rds majority in the consumer and workstation market, and that’s not insignificant, but that’s also not a significant part of their revenue by this point, nor is it why their stock makes up a terrifying percentage of the S&P 500.

If their revenue returned to just being that, they’d basically cease to be a relevant company and their stock price would crater. It’s a decent business to be in, but, it’s not a infinite growth, line goes up forever, business to be in.