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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Be pedantic as you want, steam makes no bones about it being 30%.

    And unlike other marketplaces, Steam doesn’t demand exclusivity. If anything they encourage publishers and developers to put their content on other storefronts or other alternatives that are available. Unlike, say Origin, Epic Games or what ever the hell Ubisoft was trying to.

    Steam taking 30% may seem steep but they do a lot of support for developers in addition to the largest PC marketplace out there, complete with built in communities around new games where developers can directly interact with players of their game(s.) As long as the game works as advertised, Steam has historically done very little to penalize or inhibit developers on the market place. And nearly every case of it that has come to light has been admitted to be a mistake and rectify, such in the case of Hatred, or has been transparent about a third party stopping short of legal action, such as in the case of the Mastercard censorship scandal.

    Compare that to Epic Games, who provides basically no support to developers, no community features or anyway to connect with other people who enjoy that specific game or those like it, and actively spies on users and is somewhat infamous for downloads servers to sporadically go down or corrupt a game require multiple attempts to ensure the product works. All while taking 12%

    Steam isn’t perfect, they’ve screwed stuff up and missed a few bad actors in their midst before, but overall they are very pro-consumer and provide an open and fair platform where indie games can get showcased on the front page of the store as much if not more so than AAA games with million dollar advertising campaigns. Many of those indie games never would have seen the light of day without steam.

    Steam is basically today what Netflix was in the late 00s/early 10s. A massive collection of content for people to enjoy that actively opposed the idea of exclusivity or preventing other. Where Epic is actively trying to push gaming to where Streaming is today by trying to bribe publishers and developers with better deals and kick backs if they agree to put their game on EGS exclusively for 6 to 18 months if not permanently.







  • You probably saw images of Kirk and assumed they were bad photoshops of Shapiro. They basically were two cheeks of the same ass spewing hateful shit for far right to gobble up.

    Kirk was often mocked for having a round head and relatively small face, where Shapiro was generally mocked for his numerous bad takes and awful admissions. Both of them had almost identical debate styles of just doubling down on false narratives and denying anything contrary to their agenda even in when presented with proof.







  • This plant is part of a bigger chain. So while yes, on its own it seems waste of effort, as part of the entire chain it’s a reasonable step to be more environmentally friendly and recover some energy in the process.

    A local plant desalinates water, resulting in fresh water and a brine solution that has much higher concentration of salt in it than regular sea water.

    Dumping the brine solution on its own would kill most plant and animal life around the dump site due to large saltwater concentration, so an alternative method must be found to dispose of the brine.

    Waste water from other processes can be mixed with the brine to bring it more in line with seawater salinity, making it safe to reintroduce to the ocean without severe ecological impact. This waste water is deemed to difficult or intensive to purify and treat to bring it back up clean water standards, and I’m assuming tested or filtered so as not to introduce hazardous chemicals that could damage the reverse osmosis membranes as well as sea life.

    Because there is way to mix the waste water and brine through membranes that can be used to generate electricity, this process is utilized to recover some of the energy expended in purifing the original batch of seawater resulting in the brine.

    It’s not a perfect process but it is a means of getting some use out a waste product, similar to burning garbage or rotting food rather than just dumping it into a pit and letting it rot and release methane.







  • Counterpoint, wouldn’t it be better to have 3 weeks for Christmas, 2 weeks for spring break/easter, 2 weeks in the summer and then an extra week or two break in the fall? Depending how you organize it kids could have up to 2 weeks off after every quarter/major exams.

    Or, going the other direction, you could condense it down to every other or even every Friday off, meaning 3 days weekends and 4 day work weeks for youth.

    I get the sentiment, that having 2 months or more off as a kid was great and I certainly enjoyed it at the time, but looking back it was such a bad system and I certainly would have adapted better to school if I had more breaks from it throughout the year rather than one long absence in the summer. It’s not that summer vacation needs go away entirely, it just needs to be revamped to a more manageable break and that excess time off spread out throughout the year, particularly around times where students experience the most stress so they can decompress.