greasy fry bread

Criti-hype

Don’t post reputation-washing corporate PR. Billionaires aren’t heroes when then make undemocratic donations to charity that never should have belonged to them, and LLM companies don’t get credit for trying to stem the tide of bad publicity around data centers.

The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.

• Peter Thiel, 2009

You are part of the problem

https://ghost.org/

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Haha fuck science, amirite?

Can a mirror be hosted somewhere, since it’s in the public domain?

Anyone who thinks a currency-issuing country like the US would be better off by taking $3 trillion OUT OF CIRCULATION, thereby making the American public $3 trillion POORER clearly shows that they understand NOTHING about how economies work.

Let’s say Donald Trump says corporate landlords shouldn’t be able to own houses. If someone else makes the same argument, that doesn’t make them a Trump supporter. You get that, right?

Who is defending Epic? You seem to be conflating legitimate criticism of Valve (which everyone should do) with defending the douchebag Tim Sweeney (which no one should do). But it’s a false choice to think you have to support one team or the other; both companies can be bad, and criticism of app store fees (whether Apple’s or Valve’s) has nothing to do with supporting Epic, that’s just a false equivalence.

It’s not apples to oranges, because the network effects (and coercive pressures they create) are in fact incredibly similar: sellers have to go where most customers are, and most PC gamers begin and end their search for games on Steam, just like most online shoppers begin and end their searches on Amazon.

Nobody thinks that it’s impossible, which is incredibly rare, but rather that it’s very costly not to comply, which is the source of every monopolist’s power. Could Pepsi refuse to sell at Walmart to avoid the huge wholesale discounts they demand over smaller stores? Sure, but it would shoot themselves in the foot, and that’s the source of Walmart’s anticompetitive power, which coerces Pepsi (and lots of other suppliers) and hurts lots of smaller businesses who don’t get the same discount.

Anecdotes are not data!

And Hitler was a vegetarian, but that tells us literally nothing about whether we should abuse animals in factory farms

Because partisanship. They are on Team Gaben, and can only understand criticism of valve as expressing support for Team Epic. It’s exactly the same as when libs construe any and all criticism of Democrats as support for Trump.

Appeal to expertise is not an appeal to authority. Otherwise we could never cite scientists, epidemiologists, or other experts. You might be interested in the fallacy of equivocation.

I would use other words, but I don’t think you are actually interested in understanding market power, coercion, or network effects. It is a little tricky, but if you’re not just shitposting in bad faith, Lina Khan has a great paper on digital platform monopolies and Matt Stoller has a good podcast on Valvle’s monopoly in particular. Or does Matt Stoller also not understand what a monopoly is, according to you?