While I agree with you, it's something not to be said out loud. De-humanising a group is literally the first thing the Nazis actually did, so it's kind of funny to see you call them Nazis while applying some of their playbook.

Unfortunately modern politics has devolved into name calling. People don't like being called names, and as such they don't like the people who call them names and call them names back. Rinse repeat from the other side. It results in people who may not be too different getting more extreme from opposite sides of the camp.

How are EV's a bubble? They make up a tiny portion of the market and are following a standard technological growth trend. The only bubble in the EV world is Tesla's over inflated share-price.

How is that a problem? ${Country} has been subsidizing ${Local_Industry} since governments were first formed. I find it disingenious for Americans to complain about China subsidizing EV production. Specifically Americans. The American whose taxes bailed out Ford and GM. The only reason they survived is government support.

The bigger problem is Western governments have been insanely fucking shortsighted and *not* subsidised EV production enough, leaving it open to someone with more resources to start cornering the market. By the way the EU analysed the level of subsidy provided by the Chinese government and applied tariffs appropriately. The effect isn't as big as you make it out.

And go look at the ones which aren't fake-sold. It seems like your view of the industry is based on shock news stories from the Daily Mail. If we all followed that it stands to reason that no one ever bought a Cybertruck, after all they were being abandoned in shopping mall lots as well. The reality is the stories about fake-sale EVs were not different than any story about cars when certain government deadlines hit. They were little more than a curious blip intended to meet short term numbers. Yes there's Chinese EVs which were fake-sold, and they are a tiny minority of the total production.

You say dump as if it's trash as opposed to what they actually are: very nice competently manufactured cars with great bang for buck. There's a reason why Ford's CEO drives a Chinese made EV, and then proceeded to publicly praise it. And it's not because his bonus is tied to tanking his share price.

Disclosure: I drive a Chinese made EV. A friend owns a Geely directly. Both are cars that I would buy again in a heartbeat. They are cars I chose over Audi, VW, Toyota, Tesla and Renault, all which were I test drove at the time. And while it wasn't a testdrive I dare say I'm absolutely shocked at the one time I had the true horrendous displeasure of driving a Mustang Mach-e, talk about "dump".

Exactly. You're 100% right on the definition and seem to have a lack of understanding about Steam itself. There are *NO* substitutes in the PC gaming. Substitute doesn't mean "build your own" or just "do something else", it means "achieve the outcome" in the economic sense.

There are other PC gaming stores, stores like Epic. And developers who have made Epic an exclusive have to date universally lost money and sales on their games until the point where they released on Steam at which point their sales recovered. By definition a substitute that is not viable for your business is not a substitute.

For developers Steam literally ticks every box you mentioned. They are a single seller (the alternatives lack customers, lack platform market share, and lack the APIs and options provided), there are no substitutes, price is inelastic (Steam set the entire industry price, they are often cited in the Google / Apple antitrust suits), and there's a high barrier to entry (Epic has so far spent $4bn without providing a viable substitute, EA, has abandoned its attempt at an App store).

It actually is, because market power is the one thing that underpins literally every characteristic you mentioned. Without market power you don't get the characteristics. Without those characteristics you don't have market power.

It's also worth noting that NAFTA obliterated Mexico's smaller farmers which massively ramped up illegal migration from Mexico to the US.

He is going to still walk away with hundreds of billions of dollars. Much more than Tesla will ever generate in profit.

Eventually that bad stock is going to have to be dumped somewhere. And you are no doubt planning on being able to dump it on to somebody else. Everybody is.

There aren't going to be enough suckers in the world for you to get out before the collapse. You better make sure you can afford to lose all that money. And don't forget your 401k will probably be heavily invested too so don't count on that

Private insurance looks cheaper because there are millions of insurance plans that don't actually cover anything. I can give every single American full health insurance for $1 a year as long as I never have to pay out a dime to any doctors or cover any medical care.

You always have to lie to make your side look good and to make a case for what you want. The truth always destroys right-wing politics. It has for thousands of years

And are entirely caused by Trump and his national sales tax. Importers do not know from one month or even one week to the next what's going to happen and it's creating chaos. Several auto companies have had to close down production lines because they just couldn't get parts. And that's before the uncertainty around rare Earth minerals which are absolutely critical to the battery in that EV.

Folks have not really fully grasped just how much of a fuck up electing Donald Trump was and is. I think the scale of the fuck up is a little bit too large for most people to comprehend. Trump has done as much damage in 10 months as a Republican president usually does in 8 years. We also did not get the usual 8 years of Democrats fixing the previous Republicans disastrous policies.

Given all the uncertainty and the loss of the 7500 tax credit yeah there is no way in hell anyone can sell EVS profitable unless they're using slave labor to build them like China does.

Meanwhile Tesla is about to give Elon Musk 1 trillion with a t dollars. It's not just more money than the company has ever made it's more money than the company ever can make. It took them 20 years and constant government subsidies to make 43 billion in profit. To pay Elon Musk will take 200 years.

For any other company the stock price would be cratering right now as people sell out as fast as they can but so many people bought in when Tesla was already overvalued that nobody wants to be the one that pulled the trigger and start the downward spiral. Everyone is hoping to get out and give it over to a greater fool. So it's a Mexican standoff.

The whole electric car market is poised to collapse. China might keep it going thanks to the aforementioned slave labor but without that there's nothing to sustain it anymore.

Maybe we'll survive to the midterms and the Democrats will sweep them and put a stop to Trump's insanity but that's unlikely because they need both the lower house and the Senate and the current map just plain favors the Republican party especially with all the cheating they're doing.

My friend, I think you massively misread the parent's post.

Literally everyone uses their own servers, those who do well and those who do poorly. Steam does not provide servers for gaming, period. The only thing they offer is data holding for delivering game binaries.

For multiplayer they have an API for matchmaking, and that's it. The only server service they offer is a place for users to connect before they are immediately offloaded to a developer's own server, and it's those which make or break a game.

There is no such thing as a law in the US that labels something a monopoly. Monopoly is an economic term. It doesn't come into the legal system in the USA. The USA legal system considers market dominance in wide reaching conditions and the act of monopolizing. You can very much fall afoul of antitrust law without being a monopoly, or even a duopoly or oligopoly for that matter.

Actions and power matter, not some label.

Monopoly is not a legal criteria for anything in the USA. Monopoly is an economic term defining the market dominance, and it is completely irrelevant. You're talking about anti-trust laws and the abuse of market dominance. The word you're looking for is "monopolize" the act of "monopolizing" is illegal, the state of being a monopoly is not.

You can be a monopoly (an economic definition of an entity with complete market dominance, which Steam is in PC gaming) without monopolizing (a legal term meaning abusing power to gain share).

One of the funny things about Sweeney saying Steam is bad for PC gaming is that if he actually had the market power that Steam had with his platform then his very actions would see his company get fucked into the ground by competition regulators around the world.

The action of using profits from one business to prop up another for the purposes of market manipulation becomes incredibly illegal if you actually have enough market dominance to pull it off.

I'm curious who modded this down. Please read an economics textbook.