https://youtu.be/20TAkcy3aBY?t...

I've always loathed the term "Nintendo Tax" because it implies some kind of penalty, like a wealth tax or a vice tax. Though I can't argue that it's not a real thing - Nintendo's best games hold their market value far better than rival games, even from other top-tier Japanese developers.

Still, I would approach this phenomena from the other direction. Nintendo is not able to maintain high prices because they're somehow fleecing people (as a tax would imply), but because they work to make games that stand the test of time. And then back it up with a sales strategy to match.

So much of the industry treats video games as ephemeral entertainment - something to consume, and then throw away as you move on to the next game. It's the traditional media model for TV and movies extended to interactive media. And for most of the industry it's an accurate observation: game sales are ridiculously front-loaded, and few games (especially single-player games) have a long tail. After the initial hype subsides, you need to lower your price quickly in order to keep unit sales (and thus revenue) from cratering. All the while you're already hard at work on next year's game.

But Nintendo has been able to channel the lifecycle of board games and card games. In their eyes they aren't creating media, they're creating a digital plaything. They're creating something that you'll play now, but you'll also want to play next month, next year, next decade. Case in point: Mario Kart 8 is 11 years old and the only thing that has really diminished its value (and sales) after all of this time is that it finally has a successor in Mario Kart World.

When is the last time you saw a permanent price cut on Monopoly? Uno? Settlers of Catan. The occasional sale, sure. But a copy of Catan is still going to sell for $40+, even today. That's the business strategy Nintendo is tapping into. If a game is good - like really, really good - and it's repeatedly replayable, then why does the price need to be cut soon after launch? Why can't people come along and discover it years later? Why does it need to be priced like it's a quickly depreciating asset - like a movie instead of a board game?

And that is the ultimately where the Nintendo Tax as we know it comes from. Make a game good enough, make a game gamey-enough, and don't devalue it by replacing it 3 years down the line - and it's something people will want to buy even years later.

Though this is a relatively recent phenomena. It's only after we hit the PS360U generation of hardware that systems had enough processing power and memory for games to not be constrained and do whatever they want. And that games stopped being obviously dated in terms of visual when compared to the previous generation. It's no coincidence that this was the last generation where Nintendo offered their Nintendo Selects line of discounted games.

in modern history

How about the US, period?

Did you understand anything in that marketdroid BS? I didn't.

All this screams to me is: avoid - avoid - avoid.

and summer is ultra-messed-up too here. We've had 2 days at 64 degrees this year, but otherwise it barely goes above 50. It's really rare here to have such a long, sustained bout of cold weather around midsummer.

The tech world isn't the "intellectual" class. It's the crass profit-at-all-costs business class. That's why they market AI: they know perfectly well AI is shit and nobody but corporate bean counters want it, but corporate bean counters is where the money is.

It's becoming a selling point.

Hell, I even watched a video leaked from some OnlyFans account that had the preamble "This content creator prides herself in making her own content herself entirely: no AI bullshit involved!" If the porn industry rejects it, you know it's bad for business.

I don't want AI slop in the kernel I rely on for work. Fuck that guy.

Sadly I run Sway.

As for RDP, if your internet is speedy enough, it's fine. I work remotely regularly and I RDP into my Linux box at work no problem.

including screen recording. TFA is incorrect on that one.

What it really, REALLY lacks is proper remoting. The best option available at the moment is wayvnc - i.e. VNC over a headless Wayland session. It works, but VNC sucks ass. There's no RDP support and there's no remote session greeter.

Fortunately, my only Wayland machine is a laptop, so it's not like I need to remote it a lot, if at all.

The only thing that resonates is the empty brains of vroom-vroom lovers.

Using Google - a company built entirely around ads and whatever vile things they have to do to increase ad revenues - to block ads. You gotta love it!

I genuinely want a pair of AR glasses.
At last a use case worth the hassle!

Still wondering about those upload speeds, though.

It's kind of a complex question. It depends on where you are and what plan you currently have.

If you're in a mid-split area (where Comcast is using a larger range of frequencies for upload traffic) and had a plan to take advantage of it - which it sounds like you are - then the new plans actually regress on upload speeds. The old ~1Gbps and ~2Gbps plans had 300Mbps nominal uploads (closer to 360Mbps due to overprovisioning), while all other plans were 150Mbps nominal. The new plans drop this down to 100Mbps nominal for everything except the new ~2Gbps plan, which gets 250Mbps nominal.

Unfortunately, you're facing an either/or proposition. Comcast won't remove the data cap for existing plans, you have to transition to a new plan. But if you do that, then you'll get the new, lower upload speeds. With that said, Comcast isn't forcing anyone to upgrade, so current customers can stay on their legacy plans indefinitely.