My only complaint was that you have to really try to make a similarly-priced build cost $3k, I don't know what you would even put there to bring the price that high up.

Other than that, yeah, Steam Machine costs about what a regular PC would cost.

if I walk into my local Micro Center and try to build a comparable machine, I'm getting dangerously close to $3,000.

I have a massive issue with this claim. Just what kind of parts (comparable in performance) do you choose to bring it up to that point?

This claim sounds bogus. Send the pcpartpicker list.

At most, you should end up at like 1500$, but only if you spend on looks or are clueless of what you're doing.

It's really not difficult to make a PC with similar or possibly better performance at that price.

An economics student from Russia here, here's my perspective.

First, is that a country's economy is a lot less volatile than we expected. There is also another factor that played into it. During covid, Russian companies amassed a sizable amount of inventory that was already inflated compared to European companies due to how volatile our economy is. This has given them enough time to reroute supply chains once sanctions hit.

Basically, the so-called "grey import" plays a major role in assuring the stability of our economy. Companies either route their import/export through neighboring countries or through affiliated companies.

Second is the competency of our central bank. After most of the major banks were cut off from SWIFT (used for international transactions), they raised the key rate, limited the amount of money you can cash out at one time, and did some other stuff. Higher key rate = higher deposit interest rate, but at the same time, credit became more expensive. All of this was needed for preventing banks from defaulting. Once panic died down, the changes were reverted. Now, they're dealing with inflation.

Lastly, the majority of our budget comes from oil and gas. Since Europe didn't want to buy it, Russia started selling it to Asia at discounted prices. Quantity of oil/gas sold drastically increased, which mitigated reduced prices and led to a surplus budget. Not to mention that they started pushing on large companies to reduce the amount of dividends and instead re-invest the money.

I wouldn't call it "thriving," however. All of this has definitely led to a slowdown in growth, which, as time goes by, will only get worse. But for now it's fine.

Very much illegal where I live.

Not to mention, if the company has to implement such practices, it means it has a problem retaining staff.

If it has problems retaining staff and solves it not by addressing the underlying issues but by extortion, why would you work for such a company? Their management is clearly incompetent.

Russia trying to ban Telegram is a whole epopeya that produced a lot of memes and animated videos back in the days.

Now it's a piece of history.

A story about what heppened (it's hilarious, read it):

Essentially, there's a gov agency called Roscomnadzor (from Russian communication surveillance) that is responsible for "keeping the internet a safe space", so to say.

After another law, wanted by nobody, was passed, it allowed for Roscomnadzor to request the encryption keys from all social media. Since Telegram "doesn't have those", Roscomnadzor took it to court for non-complience.

Telegram lost the case and was ordered to pay 1mil rub (about 17000USD at the time I believe) and to provide the keys. The society started joking about how that's the cheapest PR a company could get for such outreach. Overall sentiment was "Not only do they get so many people to hear about Telegram for pennies, but they also make Telegram look like a safe place to chat" (which is debatable, but w/e, that's what people thought, mind you Telegram was a very new product then)

It's also important to note that Telegram's creator, Pavel Durov, is also the creator of largest Russian social medial called VKontakte (tl. InContact) which he was robbed of and forced to leave the country.

And so, once Roscomnadzor started trying to block Telegram for, yet again, non-complience, people started beeing dissatisfied and set up a date to let paper planes out of their windows to show their support for Telegram.

Now starts the fun part.

Just in one week over 18mil IP adresses were blocked. Whilst trying to block Telegram, Roscomnadzor managed to accidentially block: Viber, some paying services, some services for selling airplane tickets, a service selling OSAGO (mandatory car insurance), ResearchGate, central repository of Java, Skolkovo Tech websited (aka Russian Silver Valley), a lot of universities' websited (including the biggest ones), some scientific archives.

They even managed to block some of Google's services, like YouTube or it's main page, Twitter, Facebook, VKontakte, Odnoklassniki (Russian social media for boomers and country bumpkins, tld as "Classmates"), Yahoo, Some Russian gov sites and I believe even their own website.

What did you not see on that list? That's right! Telegram was still fully operational.

This has caused a massive surge of memes and videos portraying Roscomnadzor as an anime character Roscomnadzor-chan trying to block all of the wicked stuff off the net, but ultimately failing all the time. She has goons, which look kinda like those half life solders, which are all secretly into all that stuff they block.

Roscomandzor also acquired a new nickname, "Roscompozor", where "pozor" means "disgraceful", think "I"m ashamed of you and I mean it" kind of way.

Since then Telegram was finally blocked, but through use of VPN many people still accessed it. Including government officials (a lot of them). In fact, it was used so much that some years after they striked a deal (involving giving users' data to Russia ofc) where Telegram was fully unblocked and still is to this day.

I believe Ubisoft considers these games as "life service," despite them effectively being single-player.

Kernel-level anticheats are specifically anti cheat. Although, if you take cheats to kernel level, they become anti-cheat in name only. For all the normal players out there, it is practically malware. No software ever should have permissions to track everything you do, see everything you have, and brick your OS just because.

They guy did his research, and he did it right. Even mentioning the "social contract", that's not something you hear from an average youtuber.

There's only a few things I've noted

Although the monthly rate can be calculated as yearly÷12 and is acceptable, it is inaccurate. Doesn't change much, but still. ( (1+monthly rate)^12 = 1+yearly rate <= this is the accurate conversion)

Next is "failed pension reform." It's failed in political sense. The intent of it was to temporarily lessen the depletion of pension fund, which it technically did do. But, yeah, it was absolutely not popular. Not to mention that it didn't solve the root of the problem, which was obvious from the start. Back during his first or second presidency period, he promised not to raise the age for retirement, yet in 2018, he did exactly that. Needless to say that his ratings have been falling ever since then and up till February of 2022.

The one thing I would've liked him to also mention is "quality of foreign exchange earnings," which is a relatively new term. Essentially, companies now need to pay attention to wether or not they can exchange earned currency for something that they can trade with other countries or within Russia. Previously, they traded in dollars, so it was never an issue.

Am a finance student from Russia.

12% is fine. It's a temporary measure to keep the currency at bay. It's not great, don't get me wrong, I'd much rather it was at 4-5% as it was in 2020, but it's appropriate given what's happenning with the country.

In comparison, on February 2022 it was 20%, which in simple terms saved the banking system from collapsing, our Cenral Bank is one of not that many agencies that are at least compitent.

It does slow down the economic growth, but trust me, there are way bigger problems than expensive credit when it comes to economic growth. Short-term everything is quite well, but long-term if nothing changes? Oh boy, oh boy.

Another way that I became quite fond of using is Rufus.

When creating a distro it allows you to customize it. Set up language beforehand, a local account, remove hardware requirements and data collection by simply checking some boxes.

It's a very handy tool, saves a lot of headache with this bloody install.

Ask people if they're for or against something that the government is doing in a country where you're not allowed to go against the government and you get the result of the majority agreeing? Shocker. That's like asking, "Are you a traitor or not?" Of course they're answering "no."

That's the same issue explained in the article you're citing. You have to look at questions that aren't direct.

Like other data from Levada (that your source is citing as a source for those 70%).

(BTW, the 70% aren't answering "are you for or against the war"? They're answering, "Do you support the army?" And we kinda have a law that doesn't really allow to say "no" to that Edit: and, that's also mentioned in the article)

Should Russia continue the war or start peace talks? (2026)

• 61% peace talks
• 30% continue war

Peace talks people have been the majority for almost the entirety of this "special military operation" (there's only 1 month in 2023 where it wasn't the case)

The number of people who want peace talks has also been steadily increasing. That's the consensus. The majority wants it to stop.

The 70% you're speaking of consists of 2 groups:

1. The pro-war people
2. The "yes" people

The first group is estimated at about 25-30%, these are the actual people who support the invasion, although recently, they seem to have become increasingly dissatisfied with the results and the government.

The second group will agree with everything that seems to fit the position of the government. They don't have an actual opinion. They're kind of like sheep: they're just trying to survive. Those are the people who take the stance of propaganda, and they are the reason propaganda works in the first place. That's ~40%

The group who is openly against war is estimated at about 15-25%, although its much more difficult to gauge it considering they are thought to be much less likely to answer questionnaires due to the risk of political prosecution.

In Soviet Union, the rock genre was for a very long time existing underground due to the inability of artists to be properly published.

Only starting with the 1980s could the artists finally publish their songs officially. And even then Soviet government put a lot of measures to prohibit rock music in the country.

This resulted in the appearance of many beloved bands and artists, like

• Kino (tl. Cinema),
• DDT,
• Aria,
• Chaif,
• Grazhdanskaya Oborona (tl. Civil Defense),
• Mashina Vremeni (tl. Time machine),
• Sektor Gaza (tl. Gas Sector)
• Korol i Shut (tl. King and Jester)
• And many others

The history of Russian rock is actually quite fascinating. It was inspired by bard songs and often touched darker subjects as well as being satirical and judgmental of Soviet government.

Due to that, some artists, like Yegor Letov from Grazhdanskaya Oborona and Yuri Shevchuk from DDT, had troubles with KGB (Soviet FBI).

Nowadays, rock artists are still being persecuted for their views. For example, DDT is de facto prohibited from performing in Russia.

Why not?

It's something that benefits both Android and Apple users by removing unnecessary restrictions.

I used to think the same.

Turns out they are a good alternative to laptops.

If you don't need powerful hardware, then tablets allow to save space in the backpack, are way lighter and always have a touch screen, which in connection with a stylus is big deal for taking notes. Laptops with a touch screen, in comparison, cost way more (at least where I live they do).

Personally, I use it for studying and media consumption. It replaced almost all of my paper. You can also sign documents using those (depends on laws in your country). Inserting photos into documents is one thing you can't do as easily with laptops as well.

And when I do need access to better hardware, I just remote to my PC at home.

You don't need a credit card for a dev account. You do, however, need to have a "business" attached. Luckily, that business they're asking for doesn't need to be verified, so it can be just a random string of letters.

Still bs that you have to go through all of that just to install apps you want.

Wouldn't be so optimistic about one on the left.

Too much mold to my liking and interior is pretty tasteless.

Here's a documentary about it, with English captions. I highly recommended watching.

I don't see how that would be the case.

PEGI is used as a way of informing buyers (parents) about the contents of the game.

It doesn't prohibit them from allowing their kids to play, say, an R-18 game. The agency's still there. It's not like a mandatory age verification where your kids are disallowed from using the service completely even when you yourself allow them to.

Clearly should've used cbat

Emulation itself doesn't constitute piracy.

Now, it does facilitate it because all you need is a ROM from any source.

However, saying emulators should be prosecuted for it would be the same as arguing that Steam's Proton should be banned because you can launch pirated games through it.

The real perpetrators are those who distribute pirated content. But going against those would be much more difficult, so they target emulators instead.

Let's assess the effects this change could cause on real numbers.

Note: This is a duplicate of a part of a comment I've written here above as a response, but I don't want it to be buried. Hope that's fine

I'll take Nutrien's 2023 audited financial statement as an example. (Numbers in brackets are what's deducted to get what's not in brackets)

• Sales - 29056
• Freight, transportation, distribution - (974)
• Cost of goods sold - (19608)
• EBIT - 8474
• Interest - (w/e)
• EBT - 1952
• Taxes - (670)
• Net earning - 1282

Out of cost of goods sold (2858) is cost of labour, let's also add (626) from general administrative expenses, and just say it's all wages.

• Effective tax rate - 670/1952*100% = 34,3% (wow, that's a lot for where I live, also ignoring mining tax for simplicity)

Let's see what happens to our efficiency if the changes take effect.

All of costs can be divided into Fixed and Variable ones. Labour, in this case, is Variable because we can manipulate it by employing more staff to compensate for reduction in working hours and keep the sales at the same rate. (Contract workers are usually Fixed Cost, but it's all relative, as no Fixed Cost is ever truly fixed.)

Going from 40 => 32, we have a 20% reduction in working hours. Mind you, this doesn't mean there will be a 20% hit to productivity. It may be more, it may be less (most likely less), for simplicity let's say it's 20%. So, we need 20% more workers to compensate. (2858+626)*120%=4180.8

• New EBT = 1952 + 2858 + 626 - 4180.8 = 1255.2
• New net profit = 1255.2*(1-34.3%) = 824.7. Mind you, the effective tax rate will probably be lower if employment affects deductibles and/or grants tax privileges.

So, our net profit margin went from 1282/29056 = 4.4% to 2.8%. Looks bad at first glance, but it's also a bad year. A year prior net profit margin was at whopping 20.3%, so a decrease from 4.4% to 2.8% would be nothing in comparison.

Will it result in increased prices? Yes, but it will also lead to economic growth, because more free time = people spend more money = companies earn more = companies grow faster, but so does inflation. If they can manage the inflation, I don't see why this couldn't be possible.

It isn't a difficult science from a learner's PoV.

It is, however, difficult in a sense of trying to figure out why in the world what happened happened, and most importantly, making it possible to do again.

That's because not only can you not experiment, you only gather data from observations, but once you share the product of your studies the reality changes in reacton to it.

In same Physics the object of your studies doesn't simultaniously study you.

Math gets involved to get a result that is somewhat reproducable. But even then since we can't factor everything we use degrees of probability/certainty.

Theoretically speaking if we managed to fully understand human behaviour then we coult predict the outcome of everything. As you can imagine, we're nowhere close to being able to do that.

Back to original post, yes, economics is closer to psychology than it is to physics. At least for the fact that we study human behaviour, but on a different scale. So sociology and political science are the closest, then psychology, next all of biological sciences, and chemistry, physics and everything related come last pretty much.

Math doesn't fit anywhere here, since it's a tool for measuring reality and not a study of reality itself.