Mama told me not to come.
She said, that ain’t the way to have fun.
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If the mere fact of being a billionaire is bad, which it obviously is,
I don’t think that’s obvious at all. Becoming a billionaire just means you have a billion dollars worth of assets, and it doesn’t say anything about how you got that money.
There’s a high correlation between billionaire’s and being a bad person, but it’s not 1:1.
Bill & Malinda Gates Foundation
It’s a fantastic charity, and it funds a lot of other great charities. I’m very much not a fan of Bill Gates’ career (I’m a diehard Linux user), but his charitable endeavors and recommended book lists are fantastic.
I don’t care if the person running a charity is a billionaire, I care that they do a good job. He has made philanthropy his life’s mission, and that’s exactly the kind of person I want backing a charity.
ethical billionaire
A close example is Warren Buffett. He’s about as ethical as they come IMO. He still lives in the same house he bought over 60 years ago, and he has given away a ton of money:
As of June 2025, Buffett had donated over $60 billion to charitable causes.
Hearing him talk about it, it’s apparently really hard to give away that amount of money. He wants to give away something like 99% of his money, but he seems to really like his job and that takes priority for him. He has claimed his children are tasked w/ giving the rest away within 10 years of his passing, outside of the little he has marked for inheritance.
I don’t misunderstand your point, I reject it. When have we ever seen a government care more about taking care of its people than gaining power for its rulers? The more money and responsibility you give to a government, the more corrupt it becomes.
That said, I do think something like UBI makes sense. Make it a simple cash pass-through where everyone is brought above the poverty line. I personally would prefer to structure it as a negative income tax, so you qualify if your income is below some amount, and everyone is brought between the poverty line and a “living wage” (say, 2X poverty line). It’s equivalent to UBI, just with less sticker shock and a clearer paper trail (need to file a tax return). Look at the government shutdown, social security is still going out, I want NIT to be the same (and ideally replace SS).
I say we replace all welfare programs with a UBI-type system. Charities would then exist to help people manage that money, get out of addictions, etc… If people are mistreated at work, they’ll have the option of leaving. If a child is mistreated, child protection services (could be a charity) can move the child and those tax dollars to a better home. UBI would solve a ton of problems just by ensuring everyone has enough.
If we touch billionaires’ money, it should be with inheritance laws. I think we should tax all assets as if they were liquidated if they aren’t donated to a qualifying charity. That’s the biggest loophole I know about, and it should be closed.
I have three kids to support, and $1M would only produce about $30k/year in income if I use 3% withdrawal. I can’t realistically use a higher withdrawal rate given how far I am from retirement.
I probably only need $2-3M (current spending is $60k or so), but $5M gives me plenty of cushion and lets me donate generously to causes I believe in. At $2-3M, I need to be careful when the economy is bad, $5M means I’ll never need to worry about money again.
Likewise, shame should be where shame is due, like with the whole lootbox gambling economy thing.
And while theirs is bad, it’s also one of the less bad of the MTX nonsense since you can trade stuff on the market, no? So even when they’re bad, they’re on the less bad end of the spectrum.
It would be nice to have no billionaires,
I agree, but the next best is to eliminate generational wealth. Maybe there should be caps on how much can be inherited, with the rest going to charities the heirs don’t directly benefit from.
I don’t think billionaires are automatically bad people, but there is a strong correlation between huge wealth and bad people.
How? All you’re really doing here is stereotyping rich people.
For example, Americans are generally fat (higher obesity rate than much of the world), but that doesn’t mean all Americans are fat. To determine whether a random American is fat, we need to actually look at them, not just know their nationality.
Why does he need society’s input? Last I checked, charities didn’t ask society at large, they just get funding from the people who care. Am I wrong to go to the park to pick up litter without asking society at large if that’s the best use of my time?
We don’t need to have everything go through a committee. If he wants to do a good thing, that’s awesome.
Yeah, it’s like $5. The 4% rule puts this at $200k, and even a very conservative 2% is $100k. That’s more than the median household income, and you get that for doing nothing.
My personal number is more like $2M, which is $40-80k. Assuming my house is paid off, that’s enough for me to be generous while not worrying about basic needs.
Yeah, I don’t understand people who ascribe more to GabeN than running a decent business. Steam has done right by me, so I remain a customer. I didn’t play many games before Steam came to Linux, then I played more and more as Linux support improved (Proton was game changing),.
My opinion of him ends there. Steam is a great product, as is the Steam Deck. If Valve stops making great products, I’ll stop buying. Whether Gabe Newell is a good person is irrelevant here.
High end would be the high end of the market components, right? So RTX 5090 ($2k+) or RX 9070 ($700+). High end CPU would be Ryzen 7 9800X3D for $400. Add a motherboard and copious RAM and you’re looking at $2k+ for all AMD, $3-5k for Nvidia.
Mid tier would be somewhere in the middle, so cut those numbers in half ($1-1.5k). Low end is what you can get away with, so cut the mod tier in half again, though going below $700 would be hard for anything but the most casual of games.
Console manufacturers haven’t sold at a loss in a long time.
They tend to at first launch. This article says it took 6 months for the PS4 and a bit longer for the PS5 to stop selling at a loss. It’s no longer the whole product lifecycle, but they are still sold at a loss at least at the start. I think that implies that hardware sales aren’t a major profit center, so even if they are profitable, there’s probably not a ton of margin.
Not necessarily. Minecraft kinda went that way, but Factorio is still independent, and they were both released around the same time.
AAA games are often based on someone else’s IPs (e.g. Tom Clancy) or derived from a successful competitor (e.g. indie games). But I haven’t seen a ton of cases where the indie studio was bought outright.
That really depends on the community. When I was there, I would avoid the larger communities and seek out smaller communities. When I first joined Reddit, it was to avoid the attention-seeking posts by humans, and near the end it was to avoid attention-seeking posts by bots and humans alike. The best content IMO is on subreddits with <100k subs and <5 posts per day.
That fits pretty much every game where you control a main character. MCs rarely have a suitable explanation for why they’re so special beyond the rule of cool. Why can Gordon Freeman take out teams of special ops? Because he’s the MC. He’s a pretty bland character that doesn’t say anything, but he’s loved by millions.
For sure, definitely be extra careful when organizing outside of the ways sanctioned by the company. In fact, I recommend not keeping any records about anything that goes on in the company, and keep union discussions about the union itself. If you want to recruit people, talk about how you’d like the relationship between the union and company to be, not about things the company is doing that you don’t like, because there’s a huge risk of giving the company a valid reason to fire you.
I’m more talking about what’s generally protected legally and what’s not. Again, if you’re looking to form a union, don’t get anywhere near that line.
Nah, I played it 2-3 years ago and it was totally fine. The only bug I recall was at the end with the helicopter sequence, and it was really frustrating. Basically, I had to set a framerate cap to 30 FPS to progress the game (60 might work too, but I needed a cap).
There’s one impactful decision soon after and then a cutscene that’s based on that decision, but otherwise that’s the end. So if you run into the bug and don’t want to fix it, just watch the ending on YouTube or something.
I want to use their launcher, but can’t, because they refuse to support it on Linux. That doesn’t feel great. Yeah, I can use Heroic, but I can use that for EGS as well. Offline installers aren’t nearly as valuable if that means I need to mess with WINE myself.
Steam eliminates all of that headache for me and gives me a first class experience. Buying from GOG feels like so much of a downgrade, so I have to convince myself to do it every time. I like that they’re DRM-free, but many of my Steam games at DRM-free as well, so it’s not a huge value add for me.