AnyOldName3

I think you might have misjudged when LCDs became common as by the end of 2004, when Halo 2 released, LCD TVs were already a reasonable fraction of new TV sales, and in parts of the world, it was only a few months later that LCD TVs became the majority. For PC monitors, the switch came earlier, so it was clear CRTs were on the way out while the game was being developed. If they hadn’t expected a significant number of players to use an LCD and tweaked the game as much as necessary to ensure that was fine, it would have been foolish

There have been times it’s been used against a whole carful of people, and cars are bigger than seven inches.

Much more straightforward in British English where d and t are more distinct

I’m glad to see someone’s made this because it’s been bouncing around in my head for ages but I’ve never got around to putting it together and letting it out.

Giving a country with a track record of violating treaties as long as Russia’s anything that lets them feel like they gained from the war in return for a treaty saying they’ll stop the war is going to cost more Ukrainian lives than continuing to fight, even to the last man. All a peace treaty like that achieves is vindicating Russia’s decision to violate the last treaty. It doesn’t stop the war, just pauses it while Russia rearms, so it can be even bloodier when it resumes than it would have been if it hadn’t paused. If Ukraine can’t make Russia lose, more Ukrainians (and more citizens of Russia’s other neighbours who are at risk of being next in line) survive if they make Russia’s victory pyrrhic so they learn that it isn’t profitable to invade their neighbours again.

In a lot of the world they’re regulated as novelty items, so free from the regulation that stops harmful chemicals being in things like kitchen utensils and childrens’ toys, despite many of the same potential risks being present. You don’t need to use a corner-cutting regulation-ignoring retailer like Wish to get your fix of toxic plasticisers etc…

The geeky minority who care that it’s open source might be predisposed to liking each other, though, so the user base wouldn’t need to be as big as a general-purpose dating app.

As it says in the article, it’ll be smaller and quieter, so less offensive for most people’s living rooms than a full-size desktop. It’s not meant to replace your existing PC if you have one, unless it was getting old and you were about to replace it anyway. If you don’t have a PC, or don’t have one in the living room, then it might be a better option than anyone else’s prebuilt.

It tends to attract negative attention if you admit there’s a civil war going on.

It’s nitpicking and also not quite right. Stock of a corportation is shares, whether or not they’re publicly traded. It becomes plural when it’s shares of multiple corporation.

However, LLCs aren’t corporations at all (the C is Company), and in the US, stock is specifically of corporations. I’m in the UK, where the equivalent to an LLC’s shares are still considered stock, and I’ve been googling whether private corporations have stock in the US, which they do, so the confusion’s been that the public/private distinction isn’t the important one and I’ve been arguing the definition of a word that’s defined differently in the relevant country.

As I said, he also owns a billion dollars worth of superyatchts for personal use in addition to the one(s) nominally for marine research.

The billion dollars in superyatchts is just the personally-owned luxury kind that billionaries like to hoard, not marine research boats that he has funded. Him giving away some of his money doesn’t mean that he’s not also frivilously spent more money than most people could hope to see in a lifetime.

Fundamentally, I don’t think we’re going to agree here, as I fundamentally believe that there’s an amount of money beyond which there are no ethical grounds for keeping it, and it’s much lower than $11 billion. Newell has kept money above that threshold instead of giving everything he made beyond that threshold away (even illiquid stuff like part of his stake in Valve could, in principle, be given to a charity so the profit from Steam went straight into the charity), and I and plenty of other people would see that as greedy. Others might say that the fact that he’s given anything away that he wasn’t legally required to means that he’s not greedy. These are subjective ethical opinions, so even though they can’t be reconciled, it’s not a big deal. Different people think different things are wrong.

The reason I’ve been replying at all is that some of the things you’ve stated to be facts are untrue, not that I’m trying to convince you that all billionaires are unethical.

Which makes his platform more popular. And in turn brings him even more cash to buy more yachts.

Realising that ratfucking your customers and suppliers at every opportunity makes them less willing to do business with you in the future, and therefore you’ll potentially make more money by not doing that, so then not doing that, is exactly what a greedy person would do if they weren’t also a moron. Gabe Newell is certainly not a moron. Lots of other billionaires are, or have other empathy-limiting conditions that mean they don’t realise people won’t want to do repeat business with them if they got screwed over the last time.

There’s obviously a majority of billionaires that are much less ethical than Newell, but one superyatcht ought to be enough for anyone, and anyone buying a second one instead of putting the money directly to good causes is not benevolent.

It doesn’t have publicly-traded shares because it’s a private company, but it’s still correct to say someone has stock in a private company corporation (which isn’t relevant as Valve is unincorporated) that they own part or all of. Like with physical objects, they don’t stop existing just because they’re not for sale to the public. It’s an easy mistake to make, though, as the vast majority of the time people talk about stocks and shares it’s in the context of buying and selling publicly-traded stock.

A man who owns a billion dollars worth of megayatchts is not doing everything he can to ethically spend/donate his wealth. Yes, lots of his wealth is tied up in Valve stock and he can’t sell that without losing voting rights and making Valve stop being what it is, but he’s rolling in other assets and cash, too

It’s its default use case - adding MBA idiocy to things that were already fine and didn’t need changing.

Investors have been happy to incentivise companies to hire idiot CEOs and managers who say the right buzzwords but reduce output by making bad decisions and only hiring people who don’t think they’re bad decisions, so an automated buzzword-dispensing idiot isn’t necessarily going to seem to investors like a downgrade compared to what they think most workers are. They’re just as likely to think AI lets them invest in companies where even the lowest tier employees are potential CEO material, and continue not noticing that the per-employee efficiency keeps going down. Data showing that layoffs nearly never pay for themselves doesn’t stop stock prices soaring whenever one happens, so I wouldn’t expect data showing AI makes companies less profitable to stop stock prices going up when a company announces a new dumb way they’ll use it.

There was quite a lag between the variable-rate mortgage rates going up and everything noticeably exploding, so lots of people who were aware there was a real risk of things going tits up decided that it hadn’t and therefore wasn’t going to and had stopped looking for signs by the time they started to appear.

The discussion on the talk page was basically nuh uh, loads of reputable sources like the Israeli and German governments say there’s no evidence of genocide, and even if they’re biased, anti-genocide NGOs are more biased because they have to accuse nations of genocide to justify their existence, with people responding to point out that’s not how Wikipedia’s rules work, and if it were, they’d have to rename the pages on various other genocides because there are very few that no nations deny.

It’s probably more risqué than that - with the rise of cam sites and then OnlyFans, plenty of people aren’t wearing any underwear at their day job at all.