The catarrhine who invented a perpetual motion machine, by dreaming at night and devouring its own dreams through the day.
People like Musk rarely take into account the overall impact of this sort of tariff in the international chain.
I’ll give you an example. I live in Latin America. My processor is AMD, so made in USA with Taiwanese semiconductors.
But let’s pretend that I were to upgrade my processor today. AMD gets 25% tariffs over Taiwanese semiconductors, but it won’t “eat” the tariff, it simply relays it to the customers. So I’d pay more for the processor.
Would I? Fuck no. I’ve run a potato computer for years, might as well do it in the future. If some Taiwanese, Chinese or European alternative pops up, less unreasonably priced, I’d be willing to buy it. Taiwan still profits, so does the local market, but instead of a chunk of my money going to USA, it would go to one of those three.
Except that I’m not the only one. Others would do the same as me. Slow but sure and cumulatively, international trade swaps the middlemen in USA with middlemen elsewhere.
AMD is getting less sales, thus less profits. Investors hate it. Why bother investing in USA? They’ll invest in a booming tariff-free alternative. Vulture capital flies away in a flock, once the carcass is gone.
And it is not just CPUs; it’s also GPUs and everything else electronics. And it is not just AMD, but Intel and every other business relying on Taiwanese microchips.
With less money entering USA, the local customer market is slightly poorer. Now there’s less pressure to attend that market. In those situations, is it worth for AMD to keep itself in USA? Rename itself to “IMD”, set up base in Ireland, boom, done.
Musk is sinking the economy of his own banana republic maize dictatorship. And it’s getting amusing to see.
[And in case anyone is wondering why I’m saying “Musk” instead of “Trump”, it’s because I genuinely believe that the later is there because the former wants it, not the opposite. Trump is that sort of tiny useful idiot, easy to control, just call him “who’s a good boy? strong man? Yes, you are, Trump! Good boy! Strong man!” and he’ll bark in the desired direction.]
Their brains were already this sort of sludge. They never gave a bloody fuck about people, their shtick was always profits. But they were willing to pink-wash, black-wash, rainbow-wash their junk, as it was good advertisement.
Now that they feel like they have the back of some banana republic maize republic they’re going all out.
Yup, it does sound like him. But I genuinely believe that his goal is manufactories beelining to USA, and that doesn’t seem too likely for me.
I’ll go further. My headcanon is that Trump didn’t come up with this idea; someone else did, and carefully led Trump to it. That person knows that the manufactories won’t go to USA, but they don’t really care - they benefit from USA being economical and politically isolated, perhaps even at its population having decreased living standards.
EDIT: or, summed up in a single picture.
They were supposed to force those manufacturing plants to go to USA, but as the article shows it is not working:
[AsRock] “As for the 10% tariff applied to other products like GPU cards, we need some time to transfer the manufacturing to other countries.” [emphasis on the plural]
We already saw signs of this late last year, when PC Partner decided to relocate its headquarters from China to Singapore
And they likely won’t move into USA territory because USA might create some tax against the governments they import raw materials from, labour costs are high, and all that talk about expelling illegal immigrants will make labour costs even higher (lower labour supply = higher prices).
Yup. You can craft leaves that grant you bonuses once equipped. In a game about blowing leaves out of your screen. (One of the achievements even pokes fun at this contradiction.)
The game is weird, to say the least, but actually fun. It reminds me Anti-Idle, as there are multiple mechanics that are barely associated with each other, except on making some numbers go up; except that those mechanics revolve around leaves as a common theme.
Picture related:
I’m a sucker for crafting and breeding systems that allow you to customise equipment and/or characters. But it’s really hard to find good implementations of the idea, most have some obvious flaw:
Plus a lot more that I didn’t mention. Sorry for the wall of text.
All those “explanations” babbling about Musk’s “intentions”… aaah, when will they cut off the crap???
Like. Let’s pretend for a moment that Musk was totally trying to convey “my heart goes out to you” or crap like that. It doesn’t bloody matter - regardless of his “intentions”, the gesture conveys support to Nazism, and it’s the only sensible way to interpret it within that context.
I mentioned IPOs as an example of things making a company take a 180°, from “we luuuv customers!” to “customers are things to be milked, not humans to care about”. There are a thousand other possibilities - being bought by another (and more abusive) corporation, being inherited by arseholes and/or fools, or even a change in the mindset of its current owners.
There’s absolutely nothing preventing all those shitty outcomes. Nothing. And when one of them happens, the suckers who “buy” games through the platform - including myself, and probably you - will be shown a middle finger, and hear a moronic “ackshyually u didn’t buy the games lol you licensed them lmao”.
You can’t trust it.
Remember when Google’s motto was “don’t be evil”? Remember when Facebook was innovative? Remember when [insert any post-IPO platform] was privately owned?
Look at the past and future, not just the present. Corporations eventually go sour, and fight against the very users that they were supposed to serve. Give Steam/Valve enough power and it’ll do the same. We don’t need corporations serving us software; we need open systems.
That said Valve is situationally useful here because it’s eroding Microsoft’s power.
I hope that SteamOS finds more of its way into desktop computers. Sure, I don’t trust Valve; just like I don’t trust any other corporation. But it’s like fighting a big cancer with a smaller meta-cancer, if they hurt Windows/Microsoft I’m happy.
Plus its current relationship with GNU/Linux is symbiotic.
I actually got a good deal for the 6600, only um barão e duzentos pila 1199 reals. I also remember seeing the 6750 XT, plenty times the price was a bit lower than you’ve mentioned. But I bought my GPU by, like, checking Terabyte+Pichau every bloody single day. (I refuse to buy it from Kabum after MagaLu bought it - quality went rock bottom after it.)
If Palworld devs were as petty as I am they’d probably make a Pal that looks like an obese and hostile Pikachu with a Mario hat.
Bonus points if the logo in the hat resembles a pokeball from a distance.
It was: the dollar will probably get higher here in Brazil in the next year, I got a fairly decent deal for the RX 6600, my other parts are rather new so the GPU was the bottleneck, and the old GPU was a NVidia GTX 580 that I installed in my computer while my nephew was still a baby. Like, I remember him playing around me and my computer as I was building the computer, nowadays the same nephew wears a stubby beard! I wish that I could’ve bought it earlier but well, Latin America, you never have money when you need it.
My sides! That crap is losing ground to older versions, and now they’re lowering the requirements!
Hey, when is Windows going to stop working if your keyboard doesn’t have a Microsoft® approved Copilot® keyboard? It would be damn great!
apt-get moo
for you guys.
EDIT: why are yall downvoting this and the_crotch’s comments? Serious question.
Now it would be a good time for itch.io to rework its search feature, so you can exclude results with a certain tag.
Right, because a hacker getting vengeance for those abuses totally isn’t the narrative people would prefer.
Maybe, in the short term. But as people feel like the vengeance was successful, the topic gets its emotional conclusion. Then the focus shifts from how that leak popped up to the contents of the leak:
Of course, I might be 100% wrong, and the leak might be actually the result of someone getting undue access to that content, or some insider getting pissed and leaking the info that they had at hand. I just think that Nintendo+GF+TPC are scummy enough to forge being leaked for their own benefit.
Summary:
Conjecture: I wouldn’t be surprised if the TeraLeak in question wasn’t planned out by Nintendo and Game Freak, to distract people from the fact that Nintendo is trying to harass a competitor out of the market and suing emulators back and right.
Those studios have been pouring huge amounts of money on graphics under the assumption (i.e. idiocy) that better graphics = more sales. Tim Sweeney is shifting it towards yet another assumption/idiocy: that more forced socialisation = more sales.
And they still don’t get the picture. People won’t buy your games if they’re boring, if they’re too expensive, or if they think that you’re an arsehole. Roughly in this order. That’s it.
It’s pretty clear that democratically speaking, we do not object to companies arbitrarily removing access to purchased video games. Only a minority objects to it.
It’s more like “people don’t know about the issue, or how it affects them, as they’re busier with their everyday lives”. This happens a fair bit.
Additionally, the graph shows that the movement had huge fervour at the start but then lost steam. So:
EDIT: can someone convince PewDiePie to at least talk about the campaign?
Seriously I fucking loved the name.