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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 17th, 2024

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  • Blocking them isn’t enough, because the harm they do with the plagiarism goes beyond stinking up your personal feed. This kind of stuff proliferates. People save the image to post somewhere else, and so on. Annoyingly, plagiarism doesn’t seem to be against the rules in this comminity, but I really think it should be.


  • No, I am here to try to understand. You have to admit that “I’m not a serial shitposter” is much less of an explanation than “ad filled comics”. So I’m a little confused what the ad is that you’re referring to. When you go to a museum, and see a painting has the artist’s name scribbled in one of the corners, do you consider that an ad? Or are you talking about something else here?







  • After the fall of the Soviet Union, every single ex soviet state in Europe (outside of Russia and Belarus) went on a spree to “decommunize” their architecture because it’s so soulless and terrible, and they’re better off for it

    Their homelessness did skyrocket after the USSR dissolved though. So saying “they’re better off for it” kind of depends on what you value more, pretty buildings or housing people.












  • Mandatory preface to prevent angry fanboys stinking up the replies: I like Steam. I use Steam. And just to be sure, democrats and republicans are not the same.

    Some folks in this thread are using American case law to argue that Steam is not a monopoly, or that Steam is a good (??@#!?!?) monopoly. They look at other cases, like Microsoft, and point out how far Microsoft had to go before it was considered a monopoly by American judges, and then point out that Steam is not as bad. There are two problems with that line of reasoning.

    The first is that monopoly law has been absolutely gutted by Reagan, and worsened by every administration (dem and rep alike) up until Biden. In the Biden admin, Lina Khan has made some very small steps to tighten up monopoly laws a bit, but obviously Trump happened (although Harris was pretty much the same as the dems before Biden, so not much hope there either). The bar for being a monopoly is unreasonably high, and American monopoly law is an absolute joke.

    Secondly, this line of thinking conflates legality with morality, or being good (enough) for society. I hope I don’t need to convince you that this idea is false. Slavery was legal.

    The argument here is not that Steam is, in the current flawed legal American sense, a monopoly, but that it is a monopoly in the sense that it has cornered enough of the gaming market that it could do very serious harm.

    Note that “they’re not currently doing harm” is not a great counterargument here. When my neighbor buys a bazooka, I won’t be satisfied by “don’t worry I’m not currently using it”.


  • It’s great that you found a way to be happy in the situation you were in. Personally, I wouldn’t have been. All the time I don’t have to spend worrying about whether I can feed my kids, or give them a roof over their heads, or worrying about them getting sick and me not being able to afford treatment, I use for things that enrich my life. I spend it with friends and family, I read books, every now and then I travel to a place I haven’t been to before.

    If you consider wanting to feed your kids and spend time with family materialistic, fine. But some folks need such shallow materialistic things to be happy. I’m one of them.