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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I don’t think he’d have the ability to target specific churches like that, he’d have to remove the blanket religious tax exemption so it would apply to all of them. I think the only way he could target specific churches is if he somehow got them reclassified as not religious institutions and I’m not sure how he would manage that. Doing that to something like the church of scientology is one thing, it’s already on shaky ground, but trying the same thing on something like the Episcopal church is something else entirely. Unfortunately I could see him maybe succeeding at getting TST reclassified.






  • It’s not the whole country, it’s the perfect storm of the absolute worst people who spent the last few decades working to seize power combined with the death throws of late stage capitalism. The political and economic elite in America (and most other countries) have merged and corrupted each other beyond redemption, but the ultra capitalist systems of the US means there are few if any effective checks to their power. In a properly functioning country the government checks the power of corporations via regulations and laws and in turn is checked by the will of the public but in the US the incessant corporate propaganda has convinced a depressingly large chunk of the population that government regulations are inherently bad and that everything works better when corporations are free to do whatever they want. That combined with the absolutely blatant bribery and corruption in US politics means that corporations control the US government rather than the other way around.

    The whole thing worked for a little while while the corporations were at least pretending to somewhat care about consumers and things like anti-monopoly regulations, but now that Trump has shown the government is very loudly and publicly for sale to the highest bidder they’ve all gone mask off and are just doing whatever they want. The problem of course is that they’re also run by morons that either don’t see the cliff they’re all collectively racing towards or just don’t care because they’re planning to bail out with all the profits while the greater US economy burns.

    Ultimately this is the sprouting of the seed that was planted back in the 50s from an amalgam of the cold war anti-communism propaganda and the latent racism that was never properly dealt with following the civil war.


  • Sure but it’s also a badly done lawsuit for that. It’s a class action of Valves customers when the percentage almost entirely impacts developers and publishers not customers. If this was really about Valves cut it would be a class action by developers. The reasons it isn’t are that that’s a much smaller group, consumer protections don’t apply to them so that would be a much harder case to win, and finally they would struggle to find developers willing to join that lawsuit. There’s also the slight problem that the 30% cut is the industry standard. Both Apple and Google take a similar cut. I’m not sure who originated that as the standard, could go all the way back to brick and mortar stores or it might have originated with one of the games consoles, but Epic is actually the odd one out in this case not Valve.

    As someone else pointed out there are things that Valve could be better about, things like lootboxes in some games or the frankly predatory CS item markets. The issue of course is that none of that is actually illegal even if it is anti-consumer. It would also be nice if Steam had some actual competition, but there isn’t anything Valve can do about that, rather it’s everyone else that needs to get on Valves level.



  • It doesn’t have anything to do with Epic, it’s because Steam provides a great service with a ton of features nobody else offers, and Valve has demonstrated time and time again that they make policies that benefit consumers.

    It would be great if Steam had some competition, but Epic ain’t it. What people want is another service of equal quality to Steam. Instead the best we have is GOG and that still falls well short of feature parity nevermind the anti-consumer cesspool of Epic.

    Suing Valve isn’t going to do anything to improve the situation. Realistically what could Valve do to be “less of a monopoly”? Lower the percentage they take of sales? Consumers wouldn’t see any benefit from that only developers. Ironically it would also increase Valves monopoly because if they took a smaller cut there would be even less reason for companies to sell on Epic as Epics lower cut is literally the only reason developers (outside of Epic literally paying some of them mounds of cash by way of exclusivity contracts) pick Epic over Steam.

    If Epic really wants to do something about Valves monopoly it’s simple, they just need to offer all the same features that Steam does. Things like family sharing, streaming support, a cross platform store and launcher, and an excellent review system so people can better understand the games they’re thinking about buying. Until that happens yes people will stick with Steam because it’s the objectively superior experience.



  • I still don’t get this. As far as I can find, Steam doesn’t allow steam keys to be sold cheaper elsewhere, but they don’t bother with prices of games in other stores.

    This is tricky. Officially Valve doesn’t have any rules about non-Steam game prices on other stores. Unofficially evidence has been put forward by way of emails between developers and Valve that seem to show that Valve unofficially requires price parity with other stores and will punish games that offer lower prices elsewhere.

    The charitable interpretation is that their policies are worded confusingly and some of their agents are misinterpreting the rule requiring Steam key prices to be uniform as applying to non-Steam keys. The uncharitable interpretation is that Valve knows such a policy would get them in hot water with anti-monopoly laws and so they’re careful to make sure it stays an unofficial policy.







  • ICE and DHS both need to be disbanded, they’re useless organizations whose function can be met equally or better by other groups. DHS has always been a sad joke of an agency, let the FBI/CIA, federal marshals or state troops handle that stuff. Likewise ICE has no need to exist, anything they do can just as easily be handled by some other law enforcement agency.

    Worst case scenario they create a new agency with no law enforcement powers to handle immigration paperwork. Make them a pure bureaucracy that only exists to file reports and help people go through the immigration process. If someone over stays their visa then the immigration bureau can refer that person to traditional LEOs at the state or federal level. There’s no reason at all why they need a dedicated law enforcement agency purely for immigrants.


  • The supremacy clause just means federal charges supercede state charges, not that federal officers are immune to state charges. If the federal courts want to bring federal murder charges against the ICE agents they could supercede the state ones, but that doesn’t stop the state officers from arresting the federal ones either until federal charges are brought or for other state crimes. Police have a long history of throwing everything they can possibly think of at someone knowing most of it won’t stick, if they wanted to I’m sure they could come up with a couple dozen state charges with no equivalent federal ones they could use to keep ICE behind state bars pending a federal court date.


  • You absolutely can. Nowhere does it say federal officials are immune to state laws. They normally don’t because of mutual respect, but if a federal officer breaks a state law they 100% can be arrested by state officers just like a state officer can be arrested by a federal officer if they break a federal law. Nobody, not even the NSA, is immune from getting arrested, there just might be some interdepartmental jockeying to get them released. If the state cops want to play hard ball though they could absolutely toss the ICE gestapo in jail and let them rot until a judge can be bothered to set bail.