Well, as the guy falling from the top of the Empire State Building was overheard saying on his way down: “well, so far so good”.

Or as the common caveat given to retail investors goes: past performance is no predictor of future results.

“So far” proves nothing because it can be “so far” only because the conditions for something different haven’t yet happenned or it simply hasn’t been in their best interest yet to act differently.

If their intentions were really the purest, most honest and genuine of all, they could have placed themselves under a contractual obligation to do so and put money aside for an “end of life plan” in a way such that they can’t legally use it for other things, or even done like GoG and provided offline installer to those people who want them.

Steam have chosen to maintain their ability to claw back games in your library whilst they could have done otherwise as demonstrated by GoG which let you download offline installers - no matter what they say, their actions to keep open the option of doing otherwise say the very opposite.

To add to your point, it’s amazing that so many people are still mindless fanboys, even of Steam.

Steam has restrictions on installing the games their customers supposedly own, even if it’s nothing more than “you can’t install it from a local copy of the installer and have to install it from the Steam servers” - it’s not full ownership if you can’t do what you want with it when you want it without the say so of a 3rd party.

That’s just how it is.

Now, it’s perfectly fair if one says “yeah, but I totally trust them” which IMHO is kinda naive in this day and age (personally, almost 4 decades of being a Techie and a gamer have taught me to distrust until there’s no way they can avoid their promises, but that just me), or that one knows the risks but still thinks that it’s worth it to purchase from Steam for many games and that the mere existence of Steam has allowed many games to exists that wouldn’t have existed otherwise (mainly Indie ones) - which is my own posture at least up to a point - but a whole different thing is the whole “I LoVe STeaM And tHeY CaN DO NotHInG wrONg” fanboyism.

Sorry but they have in place restrictions on game installation and often game playing which from the point of view of Customers are not needed and serve no purpose (they’re not optional and a choice for the customer, but imposed on customers), hence they serve somebody else than the customer. It being a valid business model and far too common in this day and age (hence people are used to it) doesn’t make those things be “in the interest of Customers” and similarly those being (so far) less enshittified than other similar artificial restrictions on Customers out there do not make them a good thing, only so far not as bad as others.

I mean, for fuck’s sake, this isn’t the loby of an EA multiplayer game and we’re supposed to be mostly adults here in Lemmy: lets think a bit like frigging adults rather than having knee-jerk pro-Steam reactions based on fucking brand-loyalty like mindless pimply-faced teen fanboys. (Apologies to the handful of wise-beyond-their-years pimply faced teens that might read this).

It’s even more basic than that: if there’s no escrow with money for that “end of life” “plan” and no contractual way to claw back money for it from those getting dividends from Valve, then what the “Valve representatives” said is a completelly empty promised, or in other words a shameless lie.

Genuine intentions actually have reliable funding attached to them, not just talkie talkie from people who will never suffer in even the tinyest of ways from not fulfulling what they promised.

In this day and age, we’ve been swamped with examples that we can’t simply trust in people having a genuine feeling of ethical and moral duty to do what they say they will do with no actual hard consequences for non-compliance or their money on the line for it.

PS: And by “we can’t trust in people” I really mean “we can’t trust in people who are making statements and promises as nameless representatives of a company”. Individuals personally speaking for themselves about something they control still generally are, even in this day and age, much better than people acting the role of anonymous corporate drone.

If there is one think we should all have learned by now in this Era is that talk means nothing at all: there have to be hard contractual clausules along with personal punishment for those who break them or some kind of escrow system for money meant to go into that “end of life” plan for it to actually be genuine.

“Valve reps have said” is worth as much as the paper it’s written on and that stuff is not even written on paper.

Liberals are just pro-Oligarchy - they think Money should be above the one power which is led by elected leaders: the State - which is against Democracy just like the Fascists, just with a different and more subtle mechanism determining those whose power is above the power of the vote.

They’re just a different kind of Far-Right from the Fascists, which is why it is so easy for them to support Zionists - which are ethno-Fascists, the same sub-type of Fascism as the Nazis - even while they commit a Genocide.

People with even the slightest shred of Equalitarian values wouldn’t ever support those commiting ethnic cleansing.

It seems to me they’re a country built on 19th century white colonialist values (Jewish white colonialism is no better than the once much more common Christian kind) and which has never evolved from those values but rather kept going until reaching the natural conclusion: Genocide.

(It’s not by chance that Israelis keep claiming that they have “Western Values” - it’s really just a politically correct way of saying “white values”)

Israel is similar to South-Africa, except that they were never forced to stop and just kept doubling down on the racism and violent oppression of the ethnicity they victimize.

I blame mainly the US and Germany for the continued support of Israel’s white colonialism and it’s natural outcome of Genocide.

I’ll hazard a guess that your circle is one mainly of highly educated city folk.

Quite independently of Religion, Education and one’s level of exposure to all sorts of people and complex social environments (which normally comes with big city life) seem to be the biggest deciding factors about people having or not “traditional values” (read: conservative) and the excessive and blind tribalism that makes them more likely to find excuses to support Genocide along ethnic lines “when our side does it”.

Ah, I’m not at all familiar with Eastern Europe (never got around to visit any of those countries, though Estonia specifically is on my list).

Could it be that there is less of a tradition of people walking around everywhere on the street due to the cold over there so there’s no real point in having small shops everywhere or maybe something to do with the building culture from back in the Communist times (I’m thinking they weren’t exactly keen on there being small businesses everywhere)?

Around here (Portugal) even with the local love for cars (not exactly the greatest characteristic of this country) people do tend to walk around in cities, especially city centers, and most housing are appartment buildings, so it’s absolutelly normal for those buildings to be made with shop spaces on the ground floor.

I’ve seen the same not just in next door Spain and further out in France, but also in places I lived in such as The Netherlands, Germany and England.

Granted, I generally lived in or visited cities, where all the more central places (what the brits call “the high street”) tend to be built like that, but for example peripheral neighbourhoods tend to have far fewer or no shops on the ground floor of buildings (and that’s also the case in Portugal), though by central I don’t mean specifically city centers, just areas in cities with more foot traffic (for example London has hundreds of maybe thousands of streets and stretches of street they would the call the “high street” which are really just the ones with more traffic and were in practice every single appartment building has shops on the ground floor, but London also has whole neighbourhoods with just one shop here or there)

Ah, interesting.

Which country is it, if you don’t mind me asking?

That kind of mixed purpose building is pretty standard in Europe (I actually can’t think of a country I lived in or visited here that doesn’t do it for most appartment buildings, expecially in areas with more foot traffic) so probably the author of the cartoon didn’t even think about that side of things at all.

I suspect appartment buildings with shops on the ground floor qualifies as one of those “it’s so common that nobody thinks about it” kind of things over here.

That example being in France, there are plenty of coffee shops serving good quality coffee much cheaper than Startbucks.

In countries like that it’s generally only the tourists from countries with no such traditions that end up in Starbucks since the locals just frequent the coffee shops which are generally much cheaper and generally have better coffee.

I live in a country that nowadays gets swamped with tourists - Portugal - especially in my hometown of Lisbon and lots of such large international brand shops pretty much only get frequented by tourists, plus there’s a certain styling of establishment that’s done to appeal to tourists - roughly, those establishments which look like the kind of thing you would find in the Departure Hall of a large Airport anywhere in the World, are aimed at tourists.

All that to say that in the context of a French Cartoon a Startbucks probably represents very well that kind of cookie-cutter same-style-everywhere-in-the-World establishment that’s actually worse and more expensive than the local version and exists to cater to tourists.

It depends on the quality of regulation in your country.

When the regulation isn’t properly done or enforced, for example when living above a restaurant you get things like excessive smells (they’re supposed to have their own chimney all the way to the top of the building) and higher fire risks (they’re supposed to have specific fire safety facilities above and beyond what a normal habitational unit would have).

Around were I am - in Portugal - living above a restaurant being a good thing or not very much depends on the municipality were you’re living since some are quite corrupt or just plain incompetent and Justice around these parts is a slow, innefective and unreliable joke.

PS: Mind you, shops on the ground floor of appartment buildings around here are pretty standard, it’s just that specifical example of yours of a restaurant might not be such a great thing to live above when the regulations that are supposed to protect everybody else aren’t sufficient or aren’t enforced. Most other kinds of shop don’t really have that problem.

Because when a significant proportion of the housing market gets turned into business spaces (which is what AirBnBs are), it reduces supply in the housing market, pushing house prices up.

This benefits politicians in several ways:

• Most national politicians are at the wealth level were they have enough savings, excess income or simply receive “housing subsidies” as part of their work (for example, parliamentarieans when they’re from a city other than where the parliament is located) that they are also “realestate investors” alongside their day-job as politiciasn, in which case higher house prices directly make their properties worth more hence make them richer.
• Realestate inflation is generally not counted in the Official Inflation indexes in most of the West. It is however counted in the Real GDP numbers (via a mechanism called Inputted Rent). Give the way Official GDP (which is the Nominal one, i.e. after inflation has been removed) is calculated, housing inflation by feeding into Real GDP but not into the inflation index used to calculate Nominal GDP from it, directly pushes up the Official GDP numbers, so for government politicias housing inflation is a wonderful way to create fake GDP Growth (fake because house prices going up by mere price inflation isn’t really actual wealth - i.e. the “Product” in GDP - being created) which they then parade all over the Press as being the result of their great work in government.
• It makes their very wealthy and very thankful friends even more wealthy and they’ll be very thankful to those politicians. Lot’s of thankfulness available from the Owner class for people who pass measures to make their Assets worth even more, from being welcome to the most luxurious events all the way to millionaire payouts in the Speech Giving Circuit, Non-Executive Board memberships and gold-plated “Consultancy” gigs.

That’s not how AIs are trained.

In a session they’re responding to what you wrote before because they have a long buffer of context for your session, but that’s just temporary and doesn’t get fed back to into anything permanent.

At least back when I lived in the UK the Greenparty were the only national party which was Leftwing, though I believe nations other than England did had more mainstream left of center parties.

I was actually a member of the Greenparty until I left the UK following Brexit and at least the people in my local are were trully well intentioned people though quite naive (IMHO). Then again in the UK I worked for almost a decade in Finance - which was pretty much Sociopath-Central - so maybe it was me being significantly more cynical and skeptical than average rather than them being more naive.

They try really hard to make the difference de facto as small as possible whilst being loudly theatrical about how “different they are” to make it seem as big as possible.

It’s why for example in the US you get loud outrage about some stupid teenagers posting a photo were they spell the N-word, but nowhere the same outrage about kids in poor inner city neighbourhoods not having anywhere the same chances in life as the rest because schools there are shit or having significantly lower life expectation because for poor people food is shit, houses are shit, healthcare is shit, even the mattresses they sleep on are shit - all of which are things which disproportionatelly impact minorities and are the mechanisms via which racism shapes lives and causes suffering 24/7.

Again and again make clown shows of morons being morons (and there are always morons) so as to avoid addressing the actual ways in which people are oppressed because those are all about money and one can’t negativelly impact the wealth and what the priviledges it buys, and if there’s one thing where both the Fascists and the Marginally-Less-Fascist are exactly the same is making sure the wealthy remain wealthy and can derive maximum priviledges of it, with zero concern for all those who must suffer for it to be so, minority members or otherwise.

Zero surprise in seeing the hard Neoliberals of New Labour siding with ethno-Fascists and silencing criticism of it even from their own party members.

For those who didn’t follow it, some years ago the Labour membership elected an actual Leftie to lead the Party - Jeremy Corbyn - overthrowing decades of total control of the party by the New Labour faction (who are hard Neoliberals, not Leftwing, and whose policies were at one point deemed by none other that Margaret Thatcher as “my greatest achievement”) and what followed was a massive slander campaign, mainly using accusations of anti-semitism anchored on statements from Israeli linked Jewish organisations, even at one point with New Labour faction politicians relentlessly keeping on the slander campaign during an election causing Labour to lose it, something they then claimed as being because Corbyn was “unelectable”, until they finally managed to bring down Corbyn and restore power to the New Labour faction who promptly went on a purge of the Labour part of any overltly Leftwing members.

Fast-forward to present times and the Neoliberals who now control the Labour party have a huge debt to the Zionists, hence their support of their Genocide (and the recent “we’re blocking some arm sales” announcement only “blocked” 20 out of 300 kinds, and was clearly just the the usual theatre so typical in UK politics)

Gotta have that support given the emotional impact of having a small underperforming penis.

It makes up for it you see…

True.

It is, however, on the wrong side of the Economy (at least at the moment) and as I pointed out they distort the Economy itself in negative ways mainly due to how much easier it is for them to leverage their footprint for rent seeking and crowding other investment out.

And don’t get me started on how they use their money to buy the political power in Democracy, corroding it, which also feeds into distortions of the Economy via the Lawmaking process.

The rich merely sitting on their horde would’ve actually been less negative for the rest of Mankind.

It sounds a lot like you’re letting Perfection be the enemy of Good Enough.

Should there be no UN because in a small proportion of situations it’s actually shit and is it really realistic to have no talking shop like that at all for as long as it takes for the World to somehow get together and make a perfect entity for that?

I’ve given some thought to it over the years and I think that the UN still does more good than bad, even whilst being shit at some things and having no real power other than that of influencing nations in general and the World’s public opinion.

Further, even if in the balance of things tearing down the UN and creating something better turned out to be the best thing to do, I don’t quite see how arbitrarily kicking countries from the UN that were deemed “badly behaving” at the moment would help us create the something better since those countries would need to be there too (it would certainly help tear down the UN, just not help with the actual primary purpose of getting something better to replace it).

A talking shop for everybody using the penalty of kicking members out only ever succeeds in turning itself into an exclusive club, and at the time when the only thing that existed were such clubs (which were naturally made up of nations allied with each other) was before and at the start of WWI and lead to it and to WWII.