Because if the last 25 years have taught us anything, it’s that the US going to war with Islamist nations creates regional peace and stability…

A bunch of social media accounts with their name and address may start attacking Scientology and right-wing crazies.

A current example is states invalidating all Trans people’s IDs during a primary election. That’s happening right now.

Also - getting an ID is expensive and time consuming in the US. The cliche of spending 4 hours in line at the DMV to get a license even though you made an appointment ahead of time isn’t an exaggeration, and applies to getting an ID as well. The reality is most people won’t spend the time and money to do it just so they can vote every 2 or 4 years - especially people who can’t afford to take a day off work and travel to do it.

But people will do it so they can drive their car every day - so people with IDs are more likely to have more money.

And for people who have driver’s licenses that fall on hard times it’s also a problem, because they stop paying for insurance (invalidates driver’s license), lose their car (keeps them from paying for insurance or renewing license), or even lose their home (address change invalidates license). These are not people who can take a day to go pay to vote. And that’s exactly what they’d be doing, because the new ID card they’d be buying would strictly be for voting. Aside from the cost of the ID, when I updated my DL in June I had to travel 80 miles round trip, and the process took about 7 hours - and I had a car to speed things up.

So it’s effectively pay-to-vote system that only applies to poor people. People with money can vote for free through “motor voter” registration by checking a box when getting or renewing their driver’s license.

The plan is only for very rich and poor people to exist.

Hundreds of things that cost tens of thousands of dollars versus thousands of things that costs hundreds of thousands a year.

You’re literally saying that Steam’s server costs are orders of magnitude less than Gamestop’s retail store location costs.

I’ve worked in retail and in tech. Tech infrastructure is expensive, but they save a metric fuckton by not requiring physical space. You could fit the entirety of all of valve’s Tech infrastructure in a single building. Of course, they don’t do that - they have it distributed in data centers all over the world. But they are renting space in server racks, whereas Gamestop is renting thousands of retail spaces for 100 grand a year, another 100 grand each on staffing them, and a metric fuckton on inventory. And their cut of the sales is tiny.

People saying they charge 30% are wrong. Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo charge 30%. Gamestop’s margin on a new game is like 10-15 percent. They make more on used games, but only if they sell. Their 100% markup on used games versus what they pay doesn’t mean as much when lots of those games go unsold. At least new games can be returned to the manufacturer.

Not 10 times the employees. 10 times the nunber of stores as Valve has employees.

Let’s look at the cost of just floor-level associates. If Gamestop employees made an average of $14 an hour and they have 2 employees working and were open 11 hours a day an average (standard is 10am to 9pm - they actually work shorter hours on Sunday, but there’s also time spent opening and closing the store and extra hours on holidays other than Christmas, so 11 is low). That comes out to over 100 grand per store just in nominal hourly wages for floor associates.

Valve would have to pay 7 figures on average per employee to have the same staffing cost as Gamestop’s lowest-paid employees.

You know what it costs to run a retail store? And even in 2025 GameStop had 10 times as many retail store locations as Valve had employees.

And it’s not like retail has no tech infrastructure expenses.

30% makes sense for a physical store with high overhead, inventory, staffing, and other expenses.

Valve could take a 5% cut and still make a ton more than a retail store for the same product.

I’m not sure where I stand there. Steam is a great platform, but for purely capitalistic reasons. The only reason they aren’t as bad as other platforms is because they’re privately-owned and take the long view because they don’t have to worry about the day-to-day fluctuations on stock value.

Gabe isn’t your friend. He’s a billionaire yacht-collector who makes the vast majority of his money by taking a massive cut from other company’s products because of their virtual monopoly that exists because they launched an online marketplace in 2004.

Just throw hard enough to trigger fusion reaction then.

Order of the Phoenix took the longest book and made the shortest film.

It’s as if extreme price increases causes by tarrifs, loss of migrant workers, and now memory/storage shortages combined with and devaluation of the dollar drive inflation and the stock market nominally goes up.

Was hoping to open the article and find out that it was an exaggerated clickbait headline and he was just doing laundry.

I should never hope when it comes to Republicans.

I suppose we could make Flock feeds into porn sites…

I used to follow them back in the 90s. The lead singer then left due to drug and alcohol problems.

That’s Capitalism, baby!

Their most-recent lead singer, formerly of DC Talk, turned out to be a super rapey POS.

I used to be the liberal gun salesman in a store full of right-wing crazies. I ended up being one of the top salesmen because word of mouth got around that I was there and didn’t spend the whole time being a dick and talking about how evil liberals and gay people were.

Universal really is the worst on that.

Disney didn’t charge extra for fast-pass last time I went there. Anyone could schedule their rides on an app so they didn’t have to wait in long lines. The only shitty thing there was that they used to make you schedule day-of, and when they changed to letting you schedule months in advance it meant that when I went on a trip with like a week’s notice all the reservations were booked.