The more pressing question: If the shops were profit centers, they wouldn't try to get rid of them..

And if they're not profit centers... Who's gonna want to get into that franchise?

And since an employee makes what, like 50 bucks a month, that company lost a whole 200 dollars because of their obviously silly decision.

The company that makes the prescription antihistamine I'm on fired the staff responsible for making sure that I get my prescription.

It took me about 4 months to sort that out during which time they lost about $400 in revenue.

The thing is they just don't seem to care. In the past there would be competition. But there just isn't any anymore anywhere. Like not too long ago my doctor would have just put me on a different drug that was easier to get and had the same effect. Those companies have been bought out and they just don't exist anymore.

It's an entirely new kind of economy. Capitalism without competition. They can keep raising prices and screwing us over and firing us and making us work longer hours for less pay and there's basically nothing we can do about it.

"There's no difference between using oil to make durable materials and burning it up to make thing hot"

If you have to lie about what folks on the other side of your argument think you either don't understand them or are just maliciously lying about it. Nobody says "No oil for anything ever" but burning gasoline to move one human being from point A to B is incredibly stupid when we have a better alternative.

Sure but we know it's their plan that doesn't tell us anything unique. Every country wants to dominate industries, it's good for countries. The USA wants to dominate the auto industry as well, we're just arguing about methods and economic philosophy is just that, philosophy. At the end of the day what matters is which nation produces the most batteries and cars that people can purchase and who can build the infrastructure to support that and despite our "superior economic philosophy" we are losing.

And no, the targeted tariffs are what we had in place for the auto industry specifically and that was give the US auto industry time to catch up, ideally it should have been with investment from the state to help transition the industry. Obama and Biden tried that and Republicans have been trying to roll it back at every opportunity. You can't just rely on tariffs forever and ever.

The general, broad global tariffs are just nonsense that hurts the USA more than it helps, its a shotgun instead of a scalpel and it only encourages China to go it alone. You say the nation needs to divest and yet the admin has been talking about wanting a trade deal with China for the entire year, it's incoherent because these people don't know what they are doing.

And that is exactly the stupid grievance based zero-sum turn off your brain thought process of conservatives that has gotten us into this mess. "Rational economic thoughts? Nah, TDS baby! The 19th century mercantilism will continue until morale improves"

It's presented as that and yet we have lived in the era of the "corporate raider", "CEO is king" culture for decades now and the track record isn't exactly holding strong.

Corporations have become condensed and far more vertical than 50 years ago with far less competition (which is really the controlling force more than decentralized decision making ever was) and capital is more concentrated in a few hands than ever before. The economy turns on what places like Blackrock, Silverlake and the Mag7 decide what to do.

We can say (and hope) Altman is a fluke but right now he or Musk or Huang can make a single statement and move billions of dollars of market activity just on those words alone.

He's upset that he gave up a treasure trove of incredibly valuable data for nothing more than some help raising money and a few contacts.

That data was worth billions and had he realized it back then he'd be part of the billionaire club.

Basically he's upset that he's not going to be the one getting to screw you over using ai and llms.

These are mixed economies, the government creates many regulations, trade agreements and other matters that affect their businesses. There was a reason in 2008 we bailed out the US auto makers, we as a nation value that industry, for the jobs, national security and general prestige and tradition. This isn't central planners VS laissez-faire but levels of mixed-economy VS mixed-economy. To think those industries and state aren't intertwined in many important ways is naive at best.

At the end of the day economic philosophy is just that and reality is China is building more and cheaper EV's and most importantly batteries for those EV's and now the western nation have to respond from a position of weakness, not strength. Same with solar panels, high speed rail and various other things. We can claim "not fair!" all we want but it ultimately doesn't matter in the face of results.

No they're not. You're exaggerating. The majority of these developments are still empty. China's declining birth rates coupled with the increased mortality from COVID have thrown in a monkey wrench into their planning. Up to 80 million units are still empty, with slim prospects for ever being bought or even used as social housing. Most of them are just crumbling ruins at this point. Even where people have moved in (often with heavy government subsidies, essentially turning units into an eastern Section 8 housing project), occupancy is still under 10%. They simply built too many units, and there aren't enough people to live in them. Some developments are being reclaimed for agriculture, with farmers grazing livestock and plowing fields on the strips of land between crumbing concrete structures.

I think the point is that the myth of the "all knowing, all efficient free market will always choose the right move versus the communist central planners" isn't really true at all, they are just as capable of corruption, bureaucratic paralysis, glad handing, and generally bad economic decisions all around. Government or corporations it's just people making decisions and reacting to incentives and many of the incentives in capitalist countries can be wildly perverse.

I'm not sure if Wire has new management but I just recently learned they've gone fully open source, are working on federation, and are using an RFC-specified tree-based efficient group chat encryption algorithm. RCS is eventually meant to adopt the same algorithm.

Folks using Telegram Groups (which are unencrypted, actually) might have a look. Yeah, somebody needs to run a server if you don't want intelligence agencies to provide one for you.

I uninstalled Wire years ago when they wouldn't take privacy seriously (yeah, I filed a bug) but it seems like a second look is warranted.

Why would China care about that, especially today when the USA is imposing tariffs of 20 to 200% depending on how the wind blows in DC today, there's little progress on comprehensive trade agreements, Trump killed the TPP which for all it's flaws was structured around the idea that the nations in the Asia-Pacific region and the US should band together to have a united front of trade against China, instead we chose the "everyone go it alone" approach, a gift basket to China.

From where I sit there's an alternate universe where the USA dominates the burgeoning EV market but we let charlatans lie about climate change, EV systems and plenty of other things to the point where now we are multiple steps behind and any attempts by the previous admin to push things forward have been undone keeping the US industry on the backfoot because god forbid anyone have to admit liberals were right about anything, a fate worse than death to some.

Easier to scale back than to scale down.

Look at it from China's POV, you have this massive manufacturing base and yet in the traditional auto market they aren't kept out by trade deals but the fact it's hard to make inroads in an industry dominated by the Americans, Europeans and Japanese companies.

Along comes the sea change that EV is bringing and if you're china 10 years ago and suddenly those 3 nations are looking to completely drop the ball. Honda and Toyota focussing on dead tech like hydrogen, the Americans refuse to believe climate change is real, the populace think battery cars are "gay and woke" and the Europeans are trying but you have VW embroiled in scandal. So why not invest in what is obvious to everyone else as the future of the automobile.

So to me there are legit complaints to say about China and how it conducts business but China doesn't care and it was obvious they'd do this to anyone paying attention. I don't consider this China's problem but the refusal of those other 3 nations to do the same for decades when it's been plainly obvious the EV would come to dominate the market.

The malaise and graft of the ICE auto industry and it's host nations left the door wide open for China, nobody should be surprised or shocked, it's our own fault.

I'm all for it if it actually happens but I'll believe it when I see it. I think all Microsoft wants to do is stop subsidizing the hardware which would defeat the purpose. At that point I can just buy my own gaming PC.

What makes steam stuff interesting is that they just kind of focus on getting it right with medium level performance and a decent price and I don't think Microsoft can do that so they're probably just going to put out a $1,200 gaming PC. That's assuming they actually pull it off and it doesn't get shot down by other people from company and fighting.

So who knows what's going to happen with AI bullshit devouring everything

Gabe Newell is 63 years old, he can still have many years to live, but he won't stay president of Steam forever. I fear that when he'll step down, the enshittification will begin.