Sorry, I don't see an issue here. Everyone is perfectly happy giving Steam loads of money for games they'll never physically own, but when it comes to consoles, suddenly we're supposed to make a stand?

No. The overwhelming majority of game sales are digital downloads.

If you think having a disc somehow solves this, try playing Gran Turismo on the PlayStation 4. Sure, you get a disc, but you still have to sit through roughly six hours of downloads and installation before the game is actually playable.

The lack of a disc isn't the issue.

I I wouldn't vote JD Vance to be poop smith in my medieval Castle latrine.

I am sorry to inform you good sir or madam that you have taken part in what is known as malpractice. You should contact a lawyer immediately and change your health care provider if you are able to do so in whatever region you are located.

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/DPMv4g

Here you go. I will admit prices have gotten much better since last I built a PC.

The above build is somewhat worse than the steam machine and it's close to 1200 bucks.

And this isn't my microcenter and doesn't involve taxes and assembly.

I'd say that I'd be pushing closer to two grand not three.

And pc parts picker isn't the end all be all for pricing. It's a relatively close estimate.

Still easier for most people to simply buy a steam machine and plug it in.

My point still stands it's fine for what it is and what it's supposed to be.

Which is pretty much what people are saying about it anyway so if you want to complain about price feel free to do so but you'd be wrong.

Sex criminals. Completely incurable... I suppose you could outlaw religion and these sex crimes would disappear in a generation or two, but we don't have time for rational solutions. - George Carlin

That's the issue with the PC gaming community. A lot of people seem disconnected from how most people actually game.

The most common graphics card on Steam is still the 3060, and the most common resolution is 1080p.

Only a relatively small segment of gamers is chasing 4K at 60 FPS or higher. The Steam Deck is not a particularly powerful device by modern PC standards, yet it's proven to be extremely capable for gaming.

So, yes, I see a decent product here. It will work perfectly well for the overwhelming majority of people who are actually going to buy it.

Luckily, you don't run a business, because dismissing a product simply because it doesn't cater to the enthusiast minority is a great way to ignore the customers who make up most of the market.

I've seen this argument in one form or another for years, and my response has never changed:

Either information on the internet is free for everyone, or it isn't.

You don't get to publish information for the public to access and then turn around and say that some people are allowed to use it while others are not, especially if the distinction is based on whether someone might make money from it.

You can't have it both ways. You can't claim information should be freely available and then try to restrict who can benefit from it.

Pick one. Either the information is free, or it isn't.

This argument has never made much sense to me.

Copyright protects the expression itself, not the ideas, facts, patterns, grammar, writing styles, or knowledge learned from that expression. Humans learn from copyrighted books, articles, movies, and music every day. Nobody claims that someone who read 10,000 copyrighted novels is committing copyright infringement every time they sit down and write a new story.

That's the part I keep seeing people ignore.

If learning from copyrighted material is infringement, then every author, journalist, musician, engineer, and artist on the planet is infringing copyright because they all learned their craft from copyrighted works created by other people.

The real question is whether an AI is reproducing copyrighted content, not whether it learned from copyrighted content. Those are two completely different issues.

You don't get to argue that learning is legal when humans do it and suddenly becomes theft when a machine does it. Either learning from publicly available information is allowed, or it isn't. The standard cannot magically change because you dislike the technology.

I'm not concerned with what YouTubers are doing.

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

My current PC is already very close to the Steam Machine's specifications, and it cost me around $2,500 when I built it back in 2022.

We also live in a time when hardware is more expensive than it has any right to be.

The price-to-performance ratio on this product is acceptable, if not slightly underpowered by today's standards. But people also need to remember that this is a fully assembled Linux gaming machine that someone can take out of the box, power on, and use immediately.

It's also worth remembering that traditional consoles are often sold at a loss because manufacturers make their money back through game sales and platform fees. That's not the business model that Valve is pursuing.

At this point, I honestly think people would have been upset no matter what Valve did. If they priced it higher, people would complain it was too expensive. If they priced it lower, people would complain it wasn't powerful enough.

Before anyone twists my point, let me be perfectly clear: I have absolutely zero tolerance for child abuse, child exploitation, or child sexual abuse material in any form. Anyone involved in harming children deserves to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

That said, this meme is exactly why social media is such a terrible place to get political information.

The post claims that three Republicans voted against a bill banning AI-generated child sexual abuse material, but then provides none of the information necessary to evaluate the claim. It doesn't tell you the bill number. It doesn't tell you who voted no. It doesn't explain their reasoning. It doesn't link the text of the bill. It doesn't even attempt to discuss what was actually in the legislation.

Instead, it relies entirely on the assumption that the audience will immediately conclude that anyone who voted against the bill must support child exploitation. That is a massive leap, and one the meme intentionally encourages.

Legislators vote against bills for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes those reasons are bad. Sometimes they are legitimate concerns about constitutionality, definitions, enforcement mechanisms, unintended consequences, or provisions that have been bundled into the legislation. Whether those objections are valid is a discussion worth having. The problem is that this meme doesn't have that discussion at all.

In fact, it doesn't provide enough information for anyone to have an informed opinion. It simply presents a highly emotional topic, omits all relevant context, and invites outrage.

Maybe those three votes were completely indefensible. Maybe they weren't. The point is that nobody reading this meme has been given enough information to know. The purpose of the post is not to inform the reader. The purpose is to provoke an emotional response and direct that emotion toward a particular political group.

If your argument is strong, you should be able to tell people what the bill was, who voted against it, and why they said they voted against it. If all of that information is missing, what you're looking at is not analysis. It's propaganda.

Ps5s are sold at a loss.

They could have done the same thing but then again a steam machine isn't a PS5.

People would immediately abuse that and start buying these up in bulk for reasons other than gaming on them.

First of all, I have no reason to believe that you work in the exact kind of environment you're using to support your argument.

I can just as easily claim that I work in an industry that absolutely proves a four-day workweek will not function. The difference is that I am actually offering reasons why it would not work in many sectors, while you have largely refused to address those concerns directly.

I've also freely admitted that a four-day workweek is possible in some industries. My position has never been that it is impossible everywhere. My position is that it is not practical for most industries.

A four-day workweek is not the solution to the broader problems workers are facing. The real issues are stagnant wages, rising costs of living, and the fact that the federal minimum wage is still only $7.25 per hour. Even the $15 per hour standard many companies have adopted is no longer enough to live comfortably in much of America. We have privatized healthcare, skyrocketing housing costs, and politicians who are allowed to trade stocks while in office, which is insane to me.

The amount of time people work is often less important than how much they are paid for that time. If wages increased substantially and people could actually afford a decent standard of living, far fewer people would be complaining about working five, six, or even seven days a week.

There is also a widespread misconception among managers that productivity means employees must be productive every second they are on the clock. In reality, what matters is the amount of work completed, not whether every minute of every day is being maximized.

A four-day workweek may be a viable option in certain industries, but it is not a universal solution. And the fact that you personally have not encountered problems related to billable hours, staffing, scheduling, or labor coverage is not evidence that those problems do not exist.

God, I hate these arguments.

"Look at all these things that happened! There must be something more to this! It's too much of a coincidence! CONSPIRACY!"

Did you know shark attacks increase alongside ice cream sales? By that logic, there must be some secret alliance between Big Ice Cream and the shark cabal.

Or maybe both go up because it's summer and more people are at the beach.

The same thing happens with plane crashes involving wealthy people. Rich people fly far more than the average person, and they often fly private aircraft, which have a higher accident rate than commercial airlines.

Not every cluster of events is evidence of secret black-ops CIA assassinations. Sometimes a correlation is just a correlation, and sometimes a streak of bad luck is just a streak of bad luck.

Also also. You have a 17 year span of time for 13 people that died in a plane crash. That's less than one person a year on average. I'd say that's pretty freaking safe compared to other modes of travel like automobiles or through The Warp.

Ok. Fine. Sure.

Not sure though what this has to do with llm companies making money. Since they write their own code and llms are trained on data.... Like wikipedia.

🤷

I'm not sure why everyone is so upset about the price.

It's a gaming computer with steam on it.

It's significantly less than a gaming rig with similar specs that you can custom build.

It's a really good product for the price.

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Tchaikovsky!

Did you even read the questions I asked?

I do not work hourly. Where is that missing 20% of revenue supposed to come from? Are employers supposed to magically generate it out of thin air?

I already complete seven work orders a day. If I lose a day or two of work each week, I would have to increase that to nine or more work orders per day just to make up the difference. No matter how you slice it, I would lose a significant amount of income on a four-day work week.

We cannot simply raise our flat rates either. This is a competitive industry. If we raise prices too much, another company will undercut us and take the business. That is how markets work.

And you still have not answered one of my main questions: what about the companies that want or need to operate more than four days a week?

I will freely admit that there are monopolies and conglomerates in certain sectors of the economy. But competition absolutely still exists throughout much of the private sector, especially among small businesses.

There is no giant nationwide conglomerate dominating plumbing, electrical work, or appliance repair. Those industries are overwhelmingly made up of small companies competing with each other.

What frustrates me is that you are not actually addressing the concerns being raised. You keep focusing on a few specific points while ignoring the larger practical questions about labor costs, revenue, staffing, competition, and business viability.

A four-day work week may work in some industries. I do not dispute that. But saying it is broadly feasible across most industries in America ignores the economic realities many businesses and workers face.

The work week we have today did not appear out of nowhere. It developed because of a large number of economic, logistical, and operational factors.

And you seem to have a problem understanding basic economics.

your employer would be required to raise your hourly rate such that you would be paid the same as you were in the old scheme.

And where would this additional money come from? In my line of work I get paid per work order closed. And that money comes from a fixed flat rate we charge. If our flat rate went up a small company would swoop in with a lower flat rate and would be willing to work more than 4 days a week.

Academically, there is little difference in a 4 vs 5 day instruction week, but certain non-academic markers improve, including teacher retention rates.

So do you pay teachers for the amount of time they work decreasing how little money they already make? There is a reason why schools operate the way they do and it's not because the four day or five day work week is better or worse they operate with the fact that parents work. That's why school starts so early. So parents can get their kids ready for school and not be late to work. What are parents supposed to do with their kids if they have a free day? Pay more for daycare or a babysitter? How would you cover that cost? As a parent I heavily rely on the school schedule to keep my kids safe while I work. But you're right academically there is no difference between going to school for 4 days or 5. Which apparently is the only metric your little brain has come up with.

The main driver of a 4 day week is that people are at least as productive in those four days

I once again agree and the amount of companies and industries that can support this kind of throughput is few and far between. I noticed you glossed over those parts. Salaried office workers comprise only a small fraction of the work force in America. Office workers aren't keeping this country afloat. It's plumbers and electricians and garbage men. Industries that cannot adopt a 4 day work week.

As long as rubes like you believe that you just have to grind harder and your millions will come, there will be no four-day week

This is what pissed me off the most. Where did you draw this conclusion from? Did I say anything like I think we should grind harder and pull ourselves up by our bootstraps? You think I don't see the massive wealth inequality especially in America? That people are literally dying on the job day to day? Or the pro corporation administration currently in power in the US? We're fucked. We're all fucked. As a four day work week isn't the solution. Which is why I brought up the fact that we live in a Scarcity-Based economy, which you once again glossed over conveniently.

As for the part about McCarthy I'll leave with my regular disclaimer before this becomes the topic of conversation: Socialism refers to collective ownership of the means of production. Social democracy refers to a capitalist market economy supplemented by welfare programs, labor protections, and public services. The two terms are not interchangeable despite frequent misuse on the internet. You are describing and advocating for social democracy not socialism.

https://youtube.com/shorts/zMmjKRettxA