A most fowl accusation!

I was an executive level data analyst for an international logistics middle man company, based in Seattle.

Yes, correct, you cannot infact outsource that just as easily, it is, as I said, an entirely different animal, with many different kinds of problems and costs, and potential problems and potential costs.

An enormous amount of logistics ultimately comes down to who knows, who, who introduces who to who, and who has what kind of reputation, with who.

You either pay a firm like the one I worked for a considerable premium in order to have them manage every single step of the process, every single link in the chain… or you try to do all that on your own, maybe hire a few new expert people to figure out how to do that.

I am arguing as if Valve is not a logistics company.

You are arguing as if you do not know anything about logistics at all.

It would seem we shall have to wait a bit then, to continue our attempts at science.

… it is a good thing, that science is fun.

Oh.

Thank heaven.

Yep, you got it.

And yep, high property value areas?

Yep, gets worse fast.

You end using something along the lines of an overflow lot, halfway across the city, and that overflow lot probably doesn’t have the same level of access, security, reliable climate control, etc, as your main warhouse / storage site.

Oh its telling of me, huh?

Tell me you’ve never worked in an industry that made or moved actual things without telling me you’ve never worked in an industry that made or moved actual things.

Active number of users on servers you are paying someone else to physically operate and maintain has nothing to do with orchestrating an international manufacturing and shipping program.

Its an entirely different animal.

Personally I’d go with ‘big truck nutz energy’, to mean ‘extreme insecurity leading to comical levels of overcompensation’.

Like really, how much of an ashamed fucking dingus do you have to be to put big ole silicone balls on your trailer hitch?

Basically guarantees you never actually use the hitch either.

Its literally a gender affirming ornament, the truck nutz themselves are honestly not terribly different from packers for transguys.

Yeah, my idea of being a ‘man’ includes the part where you wingman for your shorter buddies.

(in the context of ‘everyone is single and out to mingle’)

Some chick (or dude, or w/e if your bro is amenable) comes on to you at a bar?

Chat them up a bit, introduce them to your unironically very cool and awesome shorter friend, tell them a story about the one time bro made you look like an idiot, then metaphorically hand the mic over to him, etc.

Call it anti-chad type bro behvaior, I dunno.

Like, to me, thats what ‘Bros before Hoes’ means.

It means you don’t personally scour the field yourself, there has to be some sense of equity.

Don’t make the problem worse, instead, try to be part of the solution.

… Maybe somebody who just actually got one could weigh it for us, lol.

… Did any of us actually manage to get one?

Yeah, people in general seem to not understand that stock sitting in a warehouse = you burning money to pay for renting that warehouse, or space in that warehouse.

You have to be… mega-giant huge, your own logistiscs system, for that to basically not be the case, you have to be Amazon, Walmart, something like that.

Even then, that factor still exists, its just mitigated by the overwhelming scale.

And actually, with… oil/gas basically now permanently notched up to another tier, even in the best case scenario… this pressure just gets worse.

Also, even before the Deck, the Index was basically the same way.

Compassion is an experience, the point of being a libertine is to experience as broad a range of things for yourself as possible, but ok adieu.

‘Things you should say if you want everyone to know you’re rage-baiting shit disturber’.

She seems to strike me as basically a clever, competent, libertine.

I wouldn’t class that as a gold digger.

A gold digger, imo, would be someone who basically leeches the max amount of money / stuff out of another, and then swaps to next when the first target is drained.

I don’t get the sense that she does that, seems more like she’s just bouncing around all over the place, thus could not be making any credible false promises nor false impressions of long term commitment.

To me, ‘libertine’ best matches the personality that she seems to have by way of the format of the comic strip: Everything is an opportunity to maximize entertainment/experience , not wealth.

Like uh, how many different kinds of jobs has she worked, haha?

See that also tracks with why we hate Californians…

Cap Hill used to be affordable, and considerably more weird.

Yes, its weird, it used to be more weird.

Like uh, I remember one time about 15 years ago now (rent in Cap Hill was roughly 1/3 of what it is now), I saw an actual freak on a leash, like just full BDSM gear dude walking another BDSM dude down the street.

They were going to QFC, to get groceries, just normal stuff, most people were like ‘huh. sure. neat.’ and just went on as normal.

Then the California hipster trust fund babies moved in, followed by the techbros, raised the rent, the Seattle natives moved out, now Cap Hill is basically a tourist area, masquerading as ‘the most coolest Seattleist part of the city’.

Like, I’m in the midwest now in large part because of the real estate bubble caused by rich transplant gentrifiers.

But yeah, anyway, I did interperet the uh, full blast accent drop as a sign he was uh… comfortable talking to me, so i was genuienly happy, but also very confused, hahah!

Part of it is just a genuine gamble.

You can try to model demand for a kind of thing that has never specifically existed before.

You will probably fuck that up at first.

Early signs point to -> they significantly underestimated demand.

By how much exactly… shrug?

Also, there’s basically no way you can find no difference between the trackpads on the Steam Controller, and the trackpad on the PS controllers, unless you’ve never used a Steam Deck or the Steam Input system.

Does a PS 4/5 allow you to fully remap all the controls of a game to literally whatever you want?

Add in macros, turbos, input chords, make a joycon be a mouse, make a trackpad be a joycon, or open and navigate a custom ingame menu you made up, or be a new button pad?

Make motion controls activate under whatever conditions you specify, and map that motion to whatever input you want?

True, though this would be even more difficult to reliably measure/estimate.

Whats the term, uh, wash trading, basically, for scalpers?

Inflate volume surreptitiously, makes the market look more substantial, more liquid than it actually is.

Also allows for price manipulation.

I admire any kind of person that knows how to get what they want.

… notice how that dude isn’t in many (any?) of the other panels we’ve seen of her?

Damn fine hustle.

Valve doesn’t have the scale.

They’re nowhere near as big of a company as Nintendo, Microsoft, Sony.

FFS they have like under 500 total employees, roughly 350.

For many legal purposes in the US, they are literally a small business.

They retooled the place that was making Steam Decks… into being the place that makes Steam Controllers.

Because that would be more affordable than renting out and kitting out an entirely new production facility somewhere near Shenzen or whatever.

They’re not big enough to get first dibs, preferential contract bulk pricing, from component manufacturers.

In the ocean they’re swimming in?

They’re bass or salmon, compared to dolphins, sharks, orcas, whales.

I made a joke about this being an ‘artisinal, small batch’ controller in another thread, but it basically isn’t a joke, if you understand the scales involved.

Hah, I actually yesterday ran the same math as you just did, for total # of controllers, and yeah, we got the same result.

~42,000 if you don’t take excess packaging weight into account, yeah, probably between 35k and 40k if you do.

Now, you’re the only person (or outlet, for that matter) I’ve seen even try to do the actual math on scalp counts so uh… yeah, seems reasonable to me.

Yeah, I was telling people, like… half a year ago, that Steam sells direct to consumer, not via a retail store, so, that inherently cuts down on scalping, because they can indeed impose their own hard limits on buys per customer… barring the existence of basically a bunch of scalper fake steam accounts, which… doesn’t appear to be the case, otherwise yeah, you’d expect a larger proportion of scalper listings on secondary marketfronts.

Now I haven’t followed things close enough to see the stuff about ‘2 per txn’ vs ‘2 per Steam Account’, but I mean, what you say there also seems plausible.

tl:dr Good work, passes my smell test!

Unfortunately, all I could tell you is ‘somewhere between San Fran and LA’, lol.

This was also… damn near 20 years ago, at this point.

But I do just remember seeming endless fields of strawberries.