FishFace

Well not allowing it is just an inconvenience, as I said, so it’s really a benefit for the accountants in this comparison. But if you’re saying that has a big effect on discouraging the harmful form of ownership, the innocuous forms would be discouraged as well. That means also companies would be less likely to merge at all (regardless of resulting struxture) which would be unhealthy for the economy as it prevents synergising. But for the record I don’t think it would have a massive effect on either case.

Same way it makes this negative thing more inconvenient - there are legit reasons for a company to own another one, because it basically just helps organisation and accounting.

But it will also make legit things slightly less convenient.

If buying a company is illegal, there’s still no (practical) way to prevent the buying company say, “we’ll put you in your own separate Bioware team, no management changes for at least a year, we’ll hire anyone who wants to come over” etc. Basically, you’d have the exact same situation practically, just the legal bollocks would be different and it’d be slightly less convenient.

But it wouldn’t prevent them from buying the IP. The only thing that solves the problem is preventing ip from changing hands, but that would definitely cause problems

That would solve nothing.

Yeah I remember the 1B record. I wouldn’t say it was the first viral internet trend, but it was the MOST viral at its time - everything viral up until then was dwarfed!

I feel like Gangnam Style was a watershed moment in some way. It was the first time someone in my office said to me, “FishFace, have you seen this video…”. It was a break-out of internet culture into mainstream culture in a way I’d never experienced before. A few years later, 2017, I was in a sports club where most of the members were a fair bit younger than me, and they were all talking constantly in memes and I (as someone who had been talking in memes to my fellow terminally-online nerd friends forever) felt instantly at home - but I realised that the change had truly happened; internet memes and culture were no longer the niche preserve of nerds, but were well and truly mainstream.

So at the same time as I was enjoying having “my culture” something I could share with more people and be understood, there was a sad aspect that it was no longer special either.

I remember ditching Teamspeak due to limitations back in 2008 or 9 and moving to Mumble. Then everyone abandoned Mumble and switched to Discord, sadly.

Loss leaders don’t have to literally force people to buy your other stuff. Supermarkets sell a bunch of things at a loss that they know people are price sensitive to, because most people don’t do their weekly shop spread across multiple supermarkets. That, after all, is how supermarkets took over from the butcher, the greengrocer, the baker, etc. So it may still be that selling Steam Machines gets people in the door and more likely to buy Steam games.

But in this case this is a fairly picky point. People who aren’t already in the Steam ecosystem are fairly unlikely to buy a Steam machine, I would say, so a lot of your potential customers are already buying those games on Steam and you gain nothing. Maybe due to the form factor it replaces an XBox and so those people buy more games on Steam rather than on XBox? Hard to say.

Certainly the safer bet is to aim to at least break even.

Hey wait, don’t

Spoons are pretty safe

Possibly the mildest, nichest joke I’ve ever seen.

Love it <3

You’ve got to admire it on one level.

Hopefully they’re too scared of the GDPR to try that shit here.

Oh damn, that’s a long video… since we already have a TV I guess I won’t be watching the entire thing.

I guess they could do that if they included a wireless modem in the TV. That would be kind of crazy though - companies don’t make that much money off harvesting user data like this, so paying for a mobile connection would be surprising to me.

Before buying a TV we researched what you can use without giving it internet access. Turns out that is quite a few. We got a Samsung and indeed we never had to, and just use it as a dumb screen

It will have been systemd-oomd

I’m afraid I’m not gonna just take your word for that.

The middle class arose - in Europe at any rate - well before the 50s, before the United States which your perspective seems to assume, even existed.

Don’t feed the trolls