RubberDuck

Company sued government for not adhering to contract.

The moral outrage should be at the people involved in the contract negotiations for the government and the fucker who ended up signing said contract. That group of persons and their entire genepool should be made to fill the vacant spots.

We had something a little similar here. Local government had a contract with an incineration company for trash. Then we started separating our trash more for recycling. And the local government is now BUYING trash from Italy and trucking it here to be incinerated because that is cheaper than the fines in the contract.

Sure it has been brought up. But that’s why these investigations are good. If it’s true, slap em with a fine, if it’s not… valve can make a victory lap.

In the article

1. Price parity obligation clauses: We say that Valve Corporation imposes price parity clauses that restrict and prevent game developers from offering better prices on PC-games on rival platforms, limiting consumer choice and harming competition.

This seems to be common practice, but is anti competitive. If another platform would charge 20 instead of 30 pct and the publisher would give half this discount to the customers this would be against these clauses. Good that these are looked at.

2. Tying: We say that the restrictions Valve Corporation imposes, that mean the add-on content for games must also be purchased from Steam, restricts competition in the market.

And vice versa, steam dlc does not work with games on epic. Interesting case here too.

3. Excessive pricing: We argue that Valve Corporation has imposed an excessive commission, of up to 30%, charged to publishers, that resulted in inflated prices on its Steam platform.

The 30% market standard seems to be under fire across the board, so if there is a solid case to be made that this is excessive, I’m glad the watchdog is trying to make it.

In all good that this is investigated, cause just paying for another yaght or house for Gabe is not nessecary.

No it is not legal. Geo blocking within the EU is not allowed. But as always there are many exceptions… probably they will argue exception if ever taken to court, and if found in breach will just go “my bad” and get time to resolve the issue without a fine.

Probably not worth jumping though all the compliance hoops. Meaning it gets pretty risky if you do all sorts of shady shit without having lawyers and compliance people tell you which rules hurt and which are merely a small fine.

Fire GL 1000, Monster 3D, Matrox Millennium

I think I responded to the tone and then you see premise that insinuated that colonial oppressors are just using their advantage to once again oppress the poor indigenous people of wherever in yet another way. Which I don’t agree with.

The concept of the fediverse seems to be that admins host instances and are pretty welcoming to new communities… So if someone from I dunno Togo would setup a lomé or togo-politics community it would be supported. Meaning anyone from anywhere can use the infra provided to setup and moderate their communities.

If anything the system allows people more advantaged with resources (time, money, know how) to provide an open space that can be used by everyone (within reason). Without being beholden to big tech and her hidden profit driven agenda.

I would be more concerned about accessibility and usability from the perspective of a lot of people. As many countries that are still developing have limited time and access. And I don’t know if the current state of the fediverse in it’s development is of much help.

I’llIncreasing the usability of the whole ecosystem with improved clients, moderation tools etc (the stuff that fediverse users are requesting, and those devs are working on) will help.

Once it is mature, more will come. And like with tech, financed by early adopters this seems similar.

In the mean time I see people from all over the globe post stuff about many things, including national interest stuff that would otherwise have passed me by.

And I don’t see stuff posted in languages I don’t comprehend because my profile filteres them out. I don’t know if there are any Swahili/Papiamento/Mandarin/Indonesian posts on lemmy, but Lemmy supports many languages so that might be a thing.

Lastly the whole us vs them (colonial powers, oppressors etc etc) might be applicable to a lot of the world, however, garnering support for a cause by making accusations against the fediverse and the current generation of hosts and users does not help. I would advise a more constructive stance in general. If you see people actually being as you describe call them out and tell it like it is by all means, but this was not the way to get the ball rolling.

I’d probably gone with something like: the fediverse is growing, how can we help it develop in a direction better serving people in developing countries. To get them out from under the power hold and monopolies of the big tech conglomerates. … or something.

In that case I would have stuck with an answer like above… we need to foster and nurture it’s growth so it becomes a good alternative and the people will come. Plus… you know… ask people from these countries or maybe even get devs from there involved using stuff like patreon. Getting feedback from people not using your product… and finding out why they don’t is hard.

But Lemmy for example already did a solid by making sure the platform supports a looooot or languages “out of the box”.

Hope that’s better :).

For the record, I did not downvotes your reply as it deserves an actual response.

Yeah… those leeches from underdeveloped countries should be hosting fediverse servers with all that expendable income they have.

What a shit take.

I played it without psn account so my experience is different from what you say. If in the first 2 hours I would have walked into this as a hard block I would have stopped and refunded.

Same is true for people unable to make a psn account but cannot because their country is not supported.

So while they indicated a 3rd party account it was not a hard requirement. If they would have shown all users a message clearly explaining that a psn account linking will be a hard requirement at some point… so better already do it… they might have had a better chance… but for me I disabled cross play in the first week also because the playstation players where insufferable mostly and it caused issues during gameplay.

A trillion dollar company using your product in one of their flagship products without a support contract can fuck right off.

Microsoft should be putting up money via the support contract to support the creators in maintaining and further development of their product.

A one off payment might be technically sufficient, it is not ethically or morally sufficient. And to put it in terms shareholders understand… support contract is cheaper than the cost of an alternative.

Little dictators that have too much prominence and visibility are the threats. If a specific start point gets too prominent a lot of users could be redirected from good instances because of the little tyrants that run such a jump on point. Granted it can be easily routes around by offering alternative entry points, but a certain amount of prominence will impact not so Tech savvy users.

And in your assumption you have shown you already understand the fediverse more than a lot of people ever will. They will just join an instance and browse /ALL.

I think this is true, but the fediverse (as an entity) needs to prevent too much power accumulating at one point.

No way! Little dictators exercising the power they have. But it is their platform, they can do what they want right?

This is probably the biggest threat to the fediverse.

That’s fair. I think most people can make up their own minds looking at the thread, posts contents and then their own experience in the .ml scape compared to the rest of Lemmy.

deleted by creator

LoL… project much?

Judging from your post history, you calling me names is something I’ll wear as a badge of honor.

As I stated in my preface, no thank you.

And if it is contained in their instance… it does not matter that the borders are guarded by deFederation.

The denial of having seen it yourself, is something I don’t believe. Therefore I don’t believe you made your reply in good faith.

Not all of lemmy.ml is a cesspool filled with poisonous cretins, but they (tankies) control the instance at conversational, moderation and administration level. So it will not change, only get worse.

Just like we see with the MAGAts… Once you start drinking your own coolaid… the sky is the limit.

Is it though? As the moderation sets the tone and defines what is allowed conversation. By simply denying truth, they are guilty of the same “alternative facts” shit the trump camp is guilty of… and that is pretty damn dangerous for everyone.

And unfortunately by setting an instance to block I still have to deal with their scummy Userbase all over the fediverse. deFederation removes that too. It is a solution to the issue. Just like we won’t accept people coming on here and spouting actual nazi propaganda, an instance under the control of authoritarian apologists should not be kept around simply because they run a large instance.

I think the issue is way bigger than hexbear, or maybe they are mask off on hexbear. But hexbear, lemmygrad and lemmy.ml can be their own little island archipelago for all I care. If this helps people not have to deal with these idiots.

Keep calling everyone fascists and trump-ets, it does not help your argument.