Those rules exist because of cars. Before cars, we didn't have red lights or stop signs, and we didn't need them.
If we got rid of the cars, we could get rid of the silly requirement that everyone needs to come to a complete stop at every intersection, which only makes sense in a world where people drive 2000 pound death machines.
I'm not sure taxing them more heavily will actually result in significantly more tax revenue in the long run.
Think about it: to pay for this tax, the rich will need to sell their assets. Who is going to buy those assets? What impact would that have on the asset price?
We could start by taxing capital gains progressively, similar to salaries. In my country, you pay a flat 25% no matter if you make one dollar or a billion. Why should a worker have to give away up to 50% of their salary when people with capital only have to pay 25% tax?
Test cases being nonsensical and not testing any real world cases was extremely common even before AI, in my experience.
When teams rely on metrics like code and branch coverage, developers will write tests that only serve to satisfy those metrics. I've seen tests that end with "assert true == true"; they don't test anything and only exist to "cover" a branch.
The situation has improved vastly because of AI. AI agents frequently write good tests that have a real chance of actually catching bugs and improving the reliability of the application.
That is precisely what Valve should do. It is unfortunate that we need scalpers, simply because companies are bizarrely unwilling to adjust their pricing based on market conditions.
> bizarrely unwilling to adjust their pricing based on market conditions.
When they do this, customers have a conniption.
This works fine for luxury goods, because the whole point is that they are expensive, thus exclusive (see: Porsche, Rolex). But for regular goods, this ends up being penny wise, pound foolish. Yeah, there's a short-term bump in revenues and profits, but it gives competition a massive attack surface, as they can pull away the most loyal customers who are angry over price gouging, and those customers are probably lost forever.
In general customers don't actually care. They want the product and are equally annoyed by it selling out before they can get one and it selling for a price they can't afford, both caused by the company not having enough supply to meet current demand.
The actual reason companies don't like scalpers in contexts like this has to do with why Valve is making a console to begin with. Is it because they want to compete with Dell and HP in the market for gaming PCs? No, it's because they want to compete with Microsoft and Sony in the market for distributing games. Which in turn means they want their device to have an attractive price so that more people get one instead of getting a competitor's console. Their expected profit is primarily from selling games rather than hardware.
Selling the initial batch for a higher price is bad for that, because who is going to pay the higher initial price? Their most dedicated customers, who would have bought one from the next batch anyway if they don't get one of these. The ones who would only pay the intended sticker price are the ones who would buy the competitor's console instead of theirs if they had to pay more, and those are the customers they most want to get one immediately before the competition gets their money first.
We'll have to agree to disagree here because in my little bubble people are livid and have been swearing off things due to perceived price gouging. For me it was cereal. I like it but manufactures trying to squeeze $12 a box for it put me off enough that I just don't go down that aisle anymore. Now I eat granola.
I will note that raising the price on something you already produce and have a healthy supply of is quite different from a high introductory price on a new product you can't make enough of.
It's not that bizarre. Not everyone is trying to optimize for maximum profit. Some creators or companies want to build a community by increasing the consumer surplus received by their buyers. They are willing to trade profit for that. Scalpers slip into the middle, take the surplus for themselves, and prevent the community building or other social goods that the seller is trying to create.
Valve is where they are at because Gabe knows he is rich enough and doesn't need to squeeze every penny out of their customers' pocket, nor is there any investors making him do so. Maximizing the price of the steam machine which is already going way above the anticipated price due to component prices skyrocketing will be perceived as a giant fuck you move and burn years of goodwill, erasing a major competitive advantage valve holds over other game storefronts.
The outcome is that only people with the means to pay a lot get a product, so the optics are extremely bad. The optics are much better with a lottery system, as it trades wealth disparity determination for a dumb luck determination.
I don't think we "need" scalpers though, but they are a fundamental part of markets, and arise when you are trying to break the natural flow of markets. Scalpers are the markets punishment for trying to have your cake and eat it too.
You're right. It's not just aboutwillingness to pay, but also how much someone deserves to own a Steam Machine, which we determine by their ability to pay.
It's not a perfect system, but money is how we as a society determine how to allocate scarce resources. People labor under the promise that having additional money will give them an advantage in this type of situation.
Sounds like you love unregulated free capitalism but correct me if I am wrong. If that’s the case I wonder if you would see things differently if said system strongly disadvantaged you and your loved ones in other areas (health care, housing, education).
I think if we derive “deserving” solely by “ability to pay” we loose our humanity.
People labor so they can buy stuff in general, mostly at normal pricing. Nobody labors for the edge case of paying off a scalper to get something, and that situation's mostly going to cause bitterness that they had to work extra because the scalper inflated the price.
Even more unpopular opinion: universities don't exist to create an educated populace. People don't need universities to learn, they can read textbooks on their own.
Universities exist as gatekeepers and credentialing bodies. Their purpose is to certify that a person has studied some topic in depth and is an expert in it. They promote education indirectly, by giving people an incentive to study.
A good university is one where anyone with a degree is guaranteed to be highly knowledgeable in their field of study. This makes it easier for anyone who might want to employ or do research with graduates, as there is no need to test their knowledge.
By this metric, universities have failed spectacularly. This is particularly obvious in computer science. Employers routinely ask CS graduates to solve data structure/algorithm problems in interviews, because a degree is not enough to prove that somebody knows this stuff.
People can read textbooks on their own, but how many actually do? Even among the subset of the population that does have the drive to educate themselves, most will end up focusing on the immediately applicable, or at least immediately engaging.
You see this with Physics all the time. Even the people who are sufficiently motivated to try and teach themselves tend to neglect foundational knowledge (especially mathematics, but even stuff like Mechanics and E&M), try to jump into the advanced material (Quantum Quantum Strings Quantum Black Holes Quantum), and then fall into two camps: They either complain about how Physics using too much "jargon", or they read a bunch of "qualitative" pop-sci descriptions of the topic and then think they have an understanding of it.
At least with software, you can get pretty far just learning whatever tool is immediately useful to you, but fully self-taught developers still often end up with random holes in their knowledge.
Nobody said it is their fault. But it is their responsibility.
United States immigration policy is supposed to benefit the United States. It doesn't need to be fair.
The US can bomb a country if it's in US interests, and then deny immigrants from that country if that immigration is not in US interests. It really is that simple.
I never said that they can't bomb a country or deny immigrants. They certainly can and are. I also never said that it needs to be fair.
I'm saying its ridiculous to be mad when people are trying to immigrate to your country for a better life and you're tell them to go back to their country & fix it when you're the one(or your close friends are) actively making it worse on purpose. I'm sure you can see the hypocrisy in this.
I'm not sure what is controversial about if you want to reduce people trying to come to your country then you should promote global economic & political stability so they don't have any reason to come. Especially when you are the most powerful country in the world that is already meddling in everyone's affairs.
What websites a person is allowed to access should not be a matter of debate, it is for the individual to decide. Other people's opinions are not relevant. Even if 99% of people think a person should not be able to access a website, it is still their right to do so and they have no need to justify it.
Democracy is for deciding what to do with taxpayer money. It shouldn't be a mechanism by which people can vote to take away other people's freedoms.
Does that apply to websites full of CSAM, or that sell for-hire animal torture real-time streaming services, or that provide hitman hiring services, or...
I think your view on how government and the internet works is somewhat outdated. Social media is not just "what websites a person is allowed access to" and government is so much more than what we do with taxpayer money.
The US is evidently a poor example of what a fully formed government is so I wouldn't use that as a basis for one's world view.
Legal reform is needed to prevent American companies from complying with foreign censorship laws.
What happens if a tech company decides to follow EU law worldwide, just because it's more convenient than blocking some stuff just in the EU? That shouldn't be allowed.
What I meant was it doesn't matter if they don't voluntarily eventually they'll just be locked out of the market and their staff issued with arrest warrants should they set foot in the UK. It's not just a debt, it's a crime.
If we got rid of the cars, we could get rid of the silly requirement that everyone needs to come to a complete stop at every intersection, which only makes sense in a world where people drive 2000 pound death machines.
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