The current Economic structure is designed so that the thing that makes the most Money is having Money and tilted so that the more the Money the bigger the effect.

This is why, for example, many if not most countries have higher taxes on income from work than on income from dividends.

It’s not by chance that Social Mobility has collapsed to pretty much non-existence in most of the World, especially the US (were the saying “You can be anything” actually used to be true, but not anymore, not even close) - the Economy is so extremelly rigged for Money to make Money that the dumbest, laziest, most inept rich kid will keep on getting richer their whole lives no matter how much they fuck up.

Good, good - keep going, Mark.

Possibly even compounding, considering that there are more than just a Tech Stocks bubble and Realestate bubble at the moment (though those 2 are the largest) and any one blowing will probably cause the rest to blow.

On the “upside”, the Tech Stocks bubble is mainly in the US and countries with semiconductors as a large fraction of their Economy, such as South Korea.

If this one bursting ends the USD status as Reserve Currency, that would be great.

Painful, but in the mid and long term great.

This is going to be a mix of the 2000 Crash and the 2008 Crash.

Two things:

• GOG games DO NOT HAVE DRM to play. That’s their store’s unique value proposition. So if you still have that machine with that OS all working you can keep on playing those games forever even if GOG no longer exists. In practice in my experience of over 3 decades as a gamer, you’ll start having problems soon enough even if you refrain from updating that machine’s OS, as the OS version stops being supported as do the apps in it (for example, somebody from my family had Windows 8 until recently and eventually Google mail stopped supporting his browser version and there was no newer version of the browser that still supported Windows 8 - btw that person now has Linux) plus eventually even the machine hardware fails. Point being that an installed game is generally locked to the machine it has been installed in and the OS in it, since during installation it has probably configured a bunch of stuff in places like the registry (it’s not as bad in modern Linux were you can probably get away with just moving the entire home directory and hope for the best, but in Windows it’s still pretty bad). So you’re better off backing up the offline installers.
• I don’t used Heroic but I do use Lutris and the latter has an option to save the game installer when it downloads it from GOG during a direct “install from GOG”, so emaybe Heroic has it too. Given that the files Lutris lists as downloading when I “install from GOG” seem to be chunked just like the offline installer ones from my account page in GOG, I bet those files are the offline installer ones.

You want the Goldberg Emulator, which is basically a replacement for the steam_api DLL that lets you play those games offline.

Mind you, not all games using Steam DRM will work with it, but many if not most will by just replacing the game’s steam_api DLL with the one from the emulator.

Alternatively, just prefer GOG over Steam for games available on both stores and make sure you download the offline installers from GOG and back them up - GOG itself is not entirely immune to the kind of legal shenanigans that would force them to delist a game from their store and remove them from a buyer’s games collection but, unlike Steam, their setup makes it impossible for such legal orders to stop you from playing that game if you already have the offline installer.

This is the exact same argument that Russia does to claim that NATO is attacking them.

Logically, it’s either true for both Putin’s and Zelenskyy’s claims or false for both.

I hope so, but it’s still too early to know for sure if this the main event or just another temporary hickup.

The insane investment in data-center capacity stinks of capital misallocation - actual productive capacity being used to make things that in average have a negative ROI - rather than merelly money gambled in the modern day casino.

The Find Out stage is way worse when actual economic value has been wasted in useless stuff during the Fuck Around part than when it it was just money being used to buy overvalued virtual-value-tokens, since whilst in the latter case the money just changed hands, in the former the economic value was wasted and is gone for good.

Bear hugs?!

So, both technically and rhetorically a wanker.

Last time they tried it for gaming - with Stadia - it failed miserable.

It makes some sense for things like office applications (though of late the trust in using American and American-owned service providers for that has plummeted, at least in Europe), but for gaming it has so far failed miserably.

Even the whole artificial bottleneck of data centers being the only place where the most advanced hardware can be found would only translate into gaming moving to be cloud-based if game makers did not react to the current PC components crush by reducing the hardware demand of their products and instead all fully bet on cloud-based gaming as the future, a stupid bet at multiple levels not only due to the risk that gamers would overwhelming chose the games of those game makers who dissented and fit their games to the available home PC hardware instead of the cloud-based one but also because it could give massive influence over the success or not of those games to the cloud gaming services suppliers who could just demand more money to run it in their systems at all or to run them at higher speeds.

In summary, the idea that gaming would shift towards cloud-based gaming instead of going in the direction of continuing supporting last gen hardware, isn’t really supported by the results of past attempts at that or the comparative business outcomes for game maker from chosing one over the other.

Looks like the good old “Didn’t took a right at the crossroads and continued forward instead and then kept on insisting ‘I know the way’” driving problem.

Lebensraum

* POP *

I think we have some competition against Kissinger for the top of “Dead Evil Americans” rankings.

Not the previous poster, but personally I prefer that the application I use to organize my games collection and launch games is store independent, so something like Lutris or Heroic Launcher.

The independent launchers actually integrate with multiple stores, don’t constantly shove adverts under your nose, aren’t designed to try and make you buy more stuff or be tied as much as possible to a store and, at least in my experience of using Lutris and Steam side by side, tend to be way more flexible in terms of configuration around and use of your games (for example, I can launch my games in Lutris sandboxed with networking disabled using with something like Firejail, which I can’t with Steam).

Frankly, even only the first of those things - integrating with multiple stores, thus supporting my entire games collection - would be enough for me to favor independent games launchers.

So libraries have turned in to dens of Hookers & Blow?!

It’s a great way of doing something that was already done a thousand times and which will never need to be supported or improved on.

The very opposite of the kind of software that’s either need in a company large enough to need in-house development or whose business model is software products or services.