Yep, and here’s the simple litmus test.’

“Do I trust any of the people who are collecting large amounts of data about a large number of people?”

No, and furthermore, hell no.

Your ‘n’ key has been sleeping with the apostrophe.

“All of CrowdStrike understands the gravity and impact of the situation”

Here’s $10.

Hey, you make a lot of great points and thanks for the perspective and depth of engagement. I think “paying vendors for services you don’t want to run internally” is exactly outsourcing. With the ubiquity of big cloud services though, I hesitate to call that outsourcing even though it fits that definition. Maybe cause that’s more about the hardware than the people, I dunno. I checked real quick and seems like they do have their own data centers but use AWS and others as well around the world.

I think I may have a different default definition of outsourcing than others though after working tech support in the US for bigger companies through other smaller outsourced companies in the US. A lot of people probably assumed I meant overseas as in outsourced tech support to India. I agree with your scaling estimates and most everything else you said. Someone’s gotta design dem summer sale logos too though lol. Cheers.

Steam is available in over two hundred countries and you think 100 employees is enough to manage that? To do the account support, billing support, vendor support, user content moderation, technical support, hardware partnerships, server management, platform development, legal compliance, business development, web development, database management, HR, accounting…etc in multiple regions and in every respective language? One employee per every two countries?! Figure it out.

Steam claims they’re available in over two hundred countries. Do you really think that one employee for every two countries is enough?

Translation: They outsource a lot.

Edit: Lol, downvoted by people too dense to realize you need way more than 100 people to operate in over 200 countries with as much business as they do. OFC they outsource a lot. Your local Walmart has 100 employees.

You call my claim wildly wrong and have only this to say?

You fundamentally misunderstand the nature of newsrooms. That you can point to the instances in which they were wrong does nothing to argue that they don’t do their best to verify sources, you’re missing the fact that it’s hard sometimes, missing the fact that mainstream outlets retract statements that turn out to be false later and hedge their bets with wording. Dan Rather lost his career over an unverified source. The NBC headline about the beheaded babies literally says “Unverified reports” in the title.

I think you should read this article about the difficulties of getting the news right in the 24 hour news cycle and educate yourself instead of spewing knee-jerk nonsense which your argument fails to prove. https://www.npr.org/2023/10/24/1208075395/israel-gaza-hospital-strike-media-nyt-apology

False equivalence between Twitter news and mainstream news. Mainstream news has to verify their sources and have a reputation to protect. They retract stories that turn out to be false. As you saw with Dominion, mainstream news has money to protect from slander lawsuits too. It’s not perfect and there is certainly bias, but on Twitter there are no guardrails for misinformation besides community notes.

On the one hand that’s good and on the other it makes misinformation extremely easy. Misinformation spreads like wildfire on Twitter and the corrections don’t. The corrections get buried in “nuh uh, YOU lie” bot spam unless it gets the community notes treatment.

No information about Alpha Centauri 2? I posit an AC quote then:

“Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.” -Commissioner Pravin Lal, ‘U.N. Declaration of Rights’

Exactly. And the entire reason I like to kill stuff in video games is that I have zero desire to do it in real life.

Right, but cynics like ourselves need to jump on the proof that we were right to spread our jadedness to the masses.

Seems like his job was to “manage” the community in the control sense.

The whole article was poorly written honestly, but yeah, that part really felt off. If the only thing they care about is money, then by nature our only real means of protest is to affect their money.

Oh, apologies my good Lemming but you’re mistaken. We make affordable ones here but the auto companies decided they’d make more money if they artificially keep supply low to keep prices high. Car Graveyards

Don’t forget its fark, https://www.fark.com/

Agreed, pre-orders are a thing after all…but it’s possible that it still works too often and also that gamers are becoming a bit more jaded about marketing. I don’t buy anything till the Metacritic and Steam reviews are out, and I only watch gameplay videos any more cause who cares about the cut scenes? I’m sure I’m not the only one. Consumers eventually learn their lessons but then a new crop of consumers comes up.

Counterpoint: Call of Duty 27 should be out soon.

I was checking out Archer for streaming the other day and noticed the episodes were 22 minutes long, which means 8 minutes of commercials in that half-hour TV time slot, or 26.666% of the total time.

That’s why I stopped watching TV in the first place, they’re essentially offering to “pay” you 22 minutes of entertainment for every 8 minutes of ads you’ll watch and that’s just completely not worth it to me. Would you pay $2 to watch an hour-long show? If so, to watch ads instead, you’d pay them 16 minutes of your time, and your labor would be paid at a tad less than 8 dollars an hour in entertainment as currency. If you’d only pay a dollar, halve that.

I play games so that my entire 30 minutes is fun and I’ll pay for it with the money I make at my job rather than paying the TV industry in minutes of my time…the thing I have the least of. It’s this really weird setup that’s just become accepted where they pay us out in entertainment at near minimum-wage rates for time spent trying to program us.

(Archer aside…on shit that ain’t even that entertaining)

The whole fuckin thing isn’t worth it.

As a white middle-aged guy who spent most of my youth waiting tables for a job…No.

I agree with this, but we give them till the age of 21 to practice and develop those skills. The entire argument is not letting gaming companies introduce gambling to kids before their brains have fully developed.

You’re intentionally dumbing down the topic to make your point sound better. You’re simply describing the binary, whether addiction could be present or not. There are so many more obvious factors to consider. Addiction rate of users, personal and social impacts of that addiction, intensity of addictive behaviors, frequency of use in addicts, target demographic, marketing etc.

There’s a reason gambling has a minimum age requirement, and loot boxes are a way around that to make money by letting children gamble.

In counseling, we call those process addictions. Internet gaming, sexual addictions, gambling, shopping etc. are all process addictions. Psychological addiction isn’t precise enough as any chemical addiction could have a strong psychological component as well, and almost always does because addictions create habits of use and habits are difficult to break. Also, for instance, we might have to ditch our drinking buddies when we have alcoholism because being around them triggers our urge to drink psychologically.

This is the same as Trump saying he was just challenging the results of the election.

Namely, nobody is trying to prosecute him for his legal challenges…and nobody is complaining that games are too entertaining. They are bold strawman arguments that most people see through immediately. “Complete bullshit” is now a common argumentative tactic.

It absolutely should be, how could anyone have possibly accepted the terms and conditions of a Fishbowl account?!

Arizona State Univeristy self-imposed a ban from going to a bowl game this year in college football to address their recruiting violations…they’re 2-7 on the season…same vibe.

Good bot.

Mound and Blade 2…and nope.

Creepy ass motherfuckers. You’d almost have to be a studio exec to think this is even something you should ask.