Counter-probe the U.S. for forced labor in the American federal and state prison systems.

When you can’t trust that the votes, the comments, and the engagement you’re seeing are real, you’ve lost the foundation a community platform is built on.

Reddit and Twitter are filled to the brim with spambots and remain successful. The lack of distinction between real and fake content serves to attract marketers and propagandists to such platforms, with most users remaining due to the network effect. With its venture capitalist funding, Digg would be just as willing to benefit from spam if it held market dominance, and thus only distributed Fediverse platforms like Lemmy or Mastodon are viable solutions.

Generative AI products in general need to be better regulated. With more and more consumers trusting the output of LLMs, companies can use them to collect more consumer data than ever before and infuse marketing and propaganda into LLM outputs with no distinction, to the detriment of the genuine sources of information upon which they depend.

Penalties that are lower than profits encourage companies to rob consumers again in the future.

They are losing in the context of not being able to benefit from those resources themselves at a later point.

It exists purely to license the rights to Tetris.

Preventing Iran from acquiring a bomb is one of Trump’s stated war aims

Something that could have been achieved through continued negotiations, resulting in far fewer lives lost and less money wasted. Assassinating Iran’s leaders and threatening to invade only serves to bolster their justifications for seeking nuclear weapons in the first place.

The problem with that solution, from Valve’s perspective, is both the cost of providing the voucher (they would have to pay developers at least 70% of the voucher value) and the risk that an end-consumer that doesn’t intend to use Steam simply converts it to money by selling Steam gifts, replacing a sale they would have otherwise had while not generating additional sales from the Steam Machine user.

The ideal means of doing it to diminish that risk would be to make the voucher not usable for gifts, though Valve would still need to price the system to account for the cost of providing the voucher.

Beyond initial development costs, it didn’t cost Valve anything to ship the Index with Alyx though. Bundling in a $200 voucher would be increasing the system price by $160 in direct cost to Valve for no reason, as consumers are likely to spend that after purchasing the system, but might be dissuaded by a high initial purchase price.

A more apt comparison in that scenario would be Valve bundling their entire software library with the Steam Machine, or developing a new game to bundle with it as a means of adding value.

Because Valve would have to pay out 70% the value of the vouchers to developers in game redemptions; the break even point would therefore need to account for that amount being subtracted first (i.e. for $900 including a $200 voucher, $760).

At that point, Valve would likely have higher sales if they didn’t include the voucher and reduced the price by the 70% in voucher value it would have cost them otherwise.

but then offer a $100 - $200 Steam voucher along with it?

Then the same thing would occur—buyers not interested in using Steam would sell the vouchers or the accounts those vouchers are tied to.

Agreed; I was just disagreeing with the article’s implication that the U.S.'s involvement in Ukraine under Trump has been in any way beneficial.

Ukraine has been a forgotten war in the eyes of the U.S. ever since Trump became president; he doesn’t care about a conflict unless there’s something in it for him to gain.

Trump knowingly and willfully put their lives in danger.

Avoid minimizing or muting Twitch for a better experience.

Avoid enshittifying Twitch for a better experience.

We’ve known Trump is a liar since long before he ran for office, that’s not news.

Truth Social is not indie, and an indie Nazi is still a Nazi.

Because it’s still officially called the Department of Defense; only Congress can rename it.

More broadly, it illustrates the administration’s use of illegal boat strikes and regime change as foreign policy tools.

Your game has malicious ads:

Windows Central shouldn’t be parroting the U.S. government in mislabeling the Department of Defense.