If your profit margins vary significantly between countries and the deviation from the expected appears to line up nicely with financial transfers from a high tax country to a low tax country:

A) The high tax country should make that illegal

B) The high tax country's collections enforcement should give your corporation a financial colonoscopy followed by a fine equal to twice what you 'saved'.

In the US, in the majority of regions, it appears to serve the desires of the wealthiest members of society regardless of the expense to the remainder.

In no sane society would datacenters be prioritized over supplying water and power to citizens, nor would standards and enforcement be so lax as to leave water and power supplies unsafe and unreliable so private operators can have better profit margins.

The reason you pay taxes is to support a community that provides common benefit. When there is no benefit - and even if you're incredibly wealthy infrastructure benefits you by providing a nicer country to live in - you have to start to wonder why you're paying taxes.

I have never paid any sort of subscriptions for a games or paid for one that can't run offline on my own computer or phone. If I can't get a physical copy of a game, it has to be free or ad-supported to play. That doesn't mean I don't occasionally pay for a booster or something, or spend a few bucks for ad-free, but I sure as heck don't spend hundreds of dollars or feel any sort of loss if the game would go away.

Stop asking the nanny government to fix this. Step up and make a sacrifice yourself like a responsible adult instead of a whining baby. Your wallet is your best tool, as long as enough are willing to pay for something, companies will continue to sell it. And if the government creates rules, they will find a way around it.

On the other side, it costs money to keep those remote servers running. I don't begrudge companies for charging for it. Nor do I begrudge them to right to turn them off when they are no longer profitable. It's my choice to determine how much money I'm willing to spend for entertainment. People only rent online games and their associated purchases, they don't own them. The sooner players understand that and decide to spend accordingly the sooner the pricing structure will change. But as long as people are willing to spend hundreds of dollars to buy electrons that aren't theirs, companies will continue to offer it.

In the end, it's the consumer's choice and obligation to decide what they spend money on. Grow up and accept the consequences of your actions instead of playing the victim.

Even after all this time, I am somehow surprised that the compromised Supreme Court had to incur Trump's wrath to protect him from trying to fix the election in ways that would disproportionately disenfranchise his own base.

Two generations from now, it will be a struggle to convince students any of this actually happened. It's just too stupid to be credible even as I'm living through it.

A post-pandemic boost is plausible, but you cannot trust any numbers from the current US government, especially when it's facing slaughter in the upcoming midterms.

When I was young, I thought older people who shrugged these kinds of things off with "when it's my time, it's my time" were irrational. I'm past the half-way mark now and I get it.

I am not going to spend my life on min/maxing my health, because no matter what I do, I'm going to die. If I exercise, first I'm spending my time on something I dislike, second I will likely end up with joint issues and instead of cancer I'll just be in chronic pain.

There are limits, and I'm sure I'm making these choices at least half-blind to the odds, but I'm making the choices regardless. I eat decently but not a health-optimized diet, I make sure I move around enough that I don't lock up, and I make sure I don't get too fat to be active when I choose to be active, but I enjoy life more with my brain than my body.

If that means I lose one of the 80-90 years I'm likely to allocated given my current health, I'm absolutely at peace with that outcome. Unless science can tell me that changing my habits will give me decades more life, it's just not worth it to me to change my lifestyle over a significant but ultimately small shortening of my potential lifespan.

But I've never believed the unemployment rate was a valid measure of economic health. The numbers are fudged in too many ways.

How many people are able to work, want to work, and can't find full time employment above poverty line wages? That's what you need to look at.

I look forward to Musk overcoming the limits of insolation in Earth orbit, the latency induced by the speed of light, and the Stefan-Boltzmann law.

This is just as good an idea as the submarine he ordered built for cave rescue: it appeals to idiots who don't give any thought to the problem but think the proposed solution is 'cool'.

The US is too belligerent and unreliable - nations will be switching to sovereign cloud systems and the step after that will be sovereign social media (not to control privacy, but to limit propaganda), and then the sovereign desktop (nationally maintained Linux in most cases).

Might take a decade, unless international relations get even more hostile with the US, but we're not far from a world where an American HQ is a global business liability.

It's designed for the wrong atmosphere, wrong g, wrong instrumentation, probably the wrong nav system.

Oh, and it is the reference model for some currently deployed devices that can't be physically accessed for diagnostics.

It has the nice attribute of already existing, I'll give it that.

I will be happy to be wrong, but domestically I do not see meaningful change happening in the US without violence. The religious right is not going to let go of power peacefully.

Internationally, you can't really sanction the US - it's just too big and interconnected with the majority of the world. It's also true that the current management and culture is unsustainable and if it doesn't change course nobody will have to sanction it because it's going to collapse economically.

But a computer I can't load my own code on is no longer a general purpose computer - it's a walled-garden appliance and I'm not going to buy it.

I'm OK with stupid when it is self-defeating and self-harming.

I'm not OK with stupid when it tries to force the rest of us to come along for the ride.

> If a company (imagine a developer-owner, one-man show) stops hosting the only live server for a game because he's taking care of an ill spouse, why should he be obligated to make significant software modifications, host those patches, or create documentation instructing how to create and host a the game via a private server. And if he doesn't do so, then he has to refund everyone at the HIGHEST PRICE for which the game has sold in the last 12 months?

Like it's not child's play to include the capability from the beginning? Or to carry business insurance against the liability?

Release the server code and documentation (which you should always have and always have up-to-date), and a client patch allowing arbitrary server addresses (which you should have planned on and therefore it should be a simple patch).

Then it's up to the public to figure it out.

Yeah, climate change is a bitch when it happens on human timescales. "You shouldn't live where it's too hot" isn't really that fair to say when the place starts changing during your own lifetime.