At least for 90% of its current applications. We don't need to trade all our electricity and water for automating customer service and white collar jobs.

As for the cool stuff machine learning can do that gets done in public universities on their supercomputers. We don't need thousand acre data centers clogging up our towns and cities. Let China have that nonsense.

None of this is going to generate real GDP gains or better quality of life for the average person. It's just going to exasperate already large problems with our capitalist economies not able to generate enough quality jobs.

We are not ready to dismantle capitalism. And that's all AI is really being used for outside of a handful of the University research projects.

The vast majority of PC gamers are on steam so even if you put your game out without steam you're losing access to a massive audience.

At the same time though valve does a pretty good job of promoting games to the right users. So although they take a good chunk of money at 30% for a lot of small studios that 30% is basically their marketing budget. AAA game will typically spend more on marketing than they did on the actual game. So that seems like a pretty reasonable deal.

Yeah I don't think it's quite a hundred bucks but I spend a good $70 a month on streaming services now and it would be 80 except one of my credit cards pays for one of the services.

I can justify that because I've got my kid still using the streaming services even though they don't live with me anymore. As long as you don't make heavy use of the services they'll generally look the other way for the most part. I was going to cancel Netflix when they locked my kid out but they just never did. They are selectively enforcing those rules to prevent people like me from canceling it because there isn't enough value.

There are lots of people who curate lists of games for free because nerds like to obsess over their hobby and share it with other people. So a curated list of games isn't really a huge selling point.

What makes steam so dominant is the tools they have for doing stuff like that are really easy for users to use and encourage that kind of engagement without being overbearing.

It's extremely hard to compete with steam. One of their competitors, good old games, offers games without DRM but they have a tough time competing with steam because of the feature set steam has and general gamer inertia.

There's another store that the guys who make fortnite run called Epic and the way they compete is they basically just give away tons of free games every week. The cost of giving away free games purchased from other game companies often independent studios is cheaper than actual marketing. But it's still millions of dollars that they can pour into it and they still have a tough time competing with steam

That they have a completely dominant position in the market. They are probably 90% of the PC game sales market so it's fair to call them a monopoly.

Monopolies are only a problem when they illegally abuse their position. Typically to prevent competitors from getting into the market.

Sometimes you have natural monopolies like how you have power companies because it doesn't make sense to have multiple power companies trying to run their own lines.

And sometimes you have monopolies that form because of single company is just plain out competing everyone. That's steam.

Most of the grumbling is from studios that are big enough that they could probably go out on their own except users prefer to stick to steam because the features steam has. It's difficult for game studios to compete with steam on features because they're focused on making their game and not on making a platform to distribute and maintain and manage their game.

There is also a risk which is that the reason steam is being a monopoly isn't a problem is because the guy who runs it used to work for Microsoft and hates abusive monopolistic business practices so he doesn't do them.

He's not going to live forever and when he dies who knows what's going to happen to steam. It's basically like a fiefdom or a monarchy at that point and if you know anything about the history of monarchies when the King dies there is usually a huge mess as people scramble for power and the peasantry takes it into shorts

It's just a digital distribution platform for video games and occasionally some productivity applications.

Basically it's an app you install on a Windows PC or a Linux PC that lets you buy and install PC games from the makers of the app, Valve.

It got its start as the application you were required to install if you want to play Half-Life 2 which was an extremely popular PC game from the early 2000s. Virtually every PC gamer at the time had a copy of Half-Life 2 so every PC gamer ended up with steam installed. Before long valve was using the steam software to distribute other games they made and not long after that they started to distributing other people's games. The rest is basically history.

Steam does a very good job of providing useful tools and services to developers for doing things like supporting multiplayer, installing game modifications and finding new games you might be interested in. The last one is extremely important because there are literally tens of thousands of games released every year from Indies. Most are pretty terrible but there are inevitably some great games in there that are basically impossible to find. This is especially important because video game journalism has never been great and has only gotten worse with the end of print magazines.

Steam has overwhelming market share so they are a de facto Monopoly. In general they are a relatively benevolent Monopoly but they still do take a 30% cut. If you are a larger developer that's not really a good deal for you. For smaller developers steam does a good job of finding your audience for you effectively becoming your marketing budget.

So for example I like 3D platformers and steam introduced me to one called Penny's big breakaway that I otherwise wouldn't know existed. That's a sale to company probably would not have had without steam.

Marketing budgets can account for as much as 50% of the cost of a product so for small companies steam ends up being a fairly good deal with 30%. But larger companies still need their own separate marketing in order to drive the kind of sales they need so steam isn't nearly as valuable for them.

Then that's going to start conversations about the future of work without jobs.

We count all be plumbers.

Literally 50% of it is shitty cop dramas of the worst and lowest quality. Copaganda targeted to aging baby boomers who are still obsessed with the 70s crime waves.

Then you've got a handful of low budget and poorly written sci-fi and fantasy shows, a bunch of sitcoms with jokes we all saw when we were 10 because they've been recycling those sitcom gags since the fifties, and then a handful of miscellaneous drama shows that they can just catch up on on a streaming service for less money than cable TV costs.

TV writing is dominated by nepo babies and acting is dominated by pretty people who can't act and other nepo babies who are just attractive enough to make it on the air.

If it's all going to be slop does it really matter what slop you watch?

I kept expecting the government to crack down on the obvious and extremely dangerous money laundering that crypto facilitated.

I didn't count on multiple rounds of elections ending in absolute lunatics being put in charge of everything in multiple countries including my own.

AI doesn't just automate it eliminates.

We could handle losing switchboard operators because we still had a growing economy. We don't have that anymore. There is little or no economic growth that isn't immediately snapped up by the 1%.

in the past productivity gains would be much more evenly distributed. We completely broke that system. Productivity gains go to the top and only to the top.

This is not to say that things were hunky-dory back with switchboard operators. I said it before but we had 25% unemployment going into world war II.

None of this is rational. So yeah we might need to bring back switchboard operators and then get the money to pay for that from billionaires who are sitting on all the money in the world.

And if we don't do something then when we hit 25% unemployment people are going to demand action and they're going to do it in the least rational and most frighteningly panicked way possible and that means world war III.

Only this time we have nukes and shitloads of religious extremists who are in charge of multiple governments with nuclear weapons.

If you would like to propose some other solution I am open but right now the only solution I see is enormous make work programs because people will not accept the idea of unemployable human beings allowed to live and unemployable human beings aren't going to eat a bullet.

So y'all better figure something out or you all better get real comfortable with nuclear radiation. Maybe you can become super mutant or something.

And you're lying. And you know you're lying. The stuff you posted to has nothing to do with your comment and you're counting on people not actually clicking your links.

As an American I had a couple of bumps on my head I wanted to get removed. I got them removed immediately because I happen to have decent health insurance. They were completely non-cancerous and they were reported to my private insurance as potentially cancerous because otherwise my private insurance would not have paid the remove them. They were extremely uncomfortable but that's not enough.

Yeah because I had decent insurance I got them removed very quickly instead of waiting a couple of weeks for something that was largely cosmetic or at worst very uncomfortable.

Meanwhile I have had family members denied healthcare they need to live. So far most of them have gotten the healthcare eventually although there have been long-term complications. That is not something that happens in Canada. Even though the right wing ass wipes over there are doing everything they can to sabotage the system.

We had laws against what caused the 2008 crash and voters voted people in who removed all those laws. Reagan, Clinton and both of the Bushs.

Post 2008 we put some of those laws back in place and once again along comes the voters to put Trump in the White House and away goes all those regulations.

People really really hate bureaucrats because they have to wait in line at the DMV.

But in our country laws rich people break are enforced by bureaucrats. And those rich people have spent an awful lot of money making sure you're waiting in line at the DMV so you'll be angry at the people that enforce laws they break.

Incidentally the kind of laws you and I break getting forced by thugs with guns who will shoot us if they see a Doritos bag in our hands.

It is already shit and always was. It's great if you're healthy but if you're on Medicare congratulations you're probably not healthy. And if you are you probably won't be for very long because that's what getting old means.

Medicare advantage is a scam to privatize Medicare and dumb old people into the incredibly shitty Private health care markets against their will. It only exists because we've been letting the Republican party chip away at Medicare here and there for decades and they've managed to tack on significant expenses that a lot of poorer old people just can't afford.

The best part is once you're on one of those crappy Medicare advantage plans you can't get off it.

I mean it was implied but... And I don't usually bother copy pasting I use text to speech.

It's funny that the same people who tell me I'm ignoring reality will also ignore the history of the industrial revolution and the widespread technological unemployment that followed and the two world wars that also followed.

An argument could be made that the two world wars were exasperated by Old colonial ties, and that we don't have those colonial systems in place anymore so we don't need to worry about it.

But I would argue that we still have all those colonial systems they are just economic instead of military.

But we keep putting increasingly incompetent fools in charge of everything for a variety of stupid reasons.

So the clever people that created economic colonialism are gone and the idiots running things now are going to gradually turn towards military action to maintain the colonial system that we have. Les Belt and road and more shock and awe.

That's one nobody is talking about. Basically the baby boomers and some of the older Gen x or the only ones who really have any money because they're the only ones who received the full benefit of the new deal and the great society. By the time the millennials were up and coming those benefits were rapidly vanishing.

I'm old enough that I could literally work part-time at a fast food joint over the summer and pay for my college tuition that year.

By contrast my kids tuition at the State University I went to would only cover about half of the tuition for the first two years and one third for the final two because it goes up. That's assuming a better paying fast food job though. Like Chick-fil-A or something.

So this matters because the younger generation doesn't make enough money to be effective consumers and drive our consumer-based economy.

If you look at travel for example something like 80% of the industry is people over 50. The same goes for new car purchases and home buyers although not quite to the extent of travel.

This wouldn't be a problem if the older generation was going to leave a lot of money behind but the healthcare system is going to bankrupt them in their old age and everybody knows it. So except for a few extremely wealthy individuals not only are most people unlikely to get anything from their parents but they are probably going to be chipping in to keep their parents going. Modern healthcare means the majority of people are going to outlive any savings or property values they have. And the American healthcare system basically guarantees that. Never mind all the people tricked into a Medicare advantage plan...

This means that as the older generation dies off they aren't likely to leave anything behind but they aren't going to be replaced by new high value consumers.

Large parts of the economy are just going to cease to be. Restaurants and travel agents and movie theaters and all sorts of things that the younger generation simply cannot afford. This is going to happen while there's a huge push for automation going on too.

The center cannot hold. You cannot have a consumer based economy without consumers.

I mean I guess it's just one more thing to put on the pile of stuff that we're ignoring like the last 50 years of automation or the 50 trillion dollars shifted to the 1% in the last 40 years or climate change wrecking the water cycle creating perpetual drought or AI data centers sucking down all the water and electricity or... Well you get the idea.

Too many problems and nobody actually trying to solve them because there's too many pointless distractions.