Tinidril

I think you might just have forgotten how many workers faught and died to bring us those things. They were not given, they were the result of what began with the luddites. The world's first arial bombardment from airplanes was bombs dropped on striking US coal miners.

Now those at home machines are designed to be replaced every 8-10 years max, are filling up our landfills and poisoning our environment, and even starting to spy on us in the mean time. Black lungs coming back. We forgot what all these gains cost, and were handing them back bit by bit.

Luddites wouldn't disagree. They specifically rebelled against how technology was being used against workers by capital.

Just an aside, the luddites were right. The benefits of automation have been hoarded by the owner class and used to make workers do even more for less compensation.

Probably a waste of time until you review how the law was written. Odds are it just doesn't apply. It's a job for lawmakers at this point, not a judge.

Now, if it hits a kid before the law gets written, a judge would preside over a civil case. There might even be a civil case against the legislature, depending on how that works in the jurisdiction.

To put it differently, if they are the proximate cause of the Trump presidency, then you are the ultimate cause. I throw up my hands at trying to decide which matters more.

That's the part where I'm sympathetic to your argument. I think anyone not voting for Harris made a mistake. I also think the arguments people like you made for people to vote for Harris were really really bad and that you are enabling the Democrats to continue down a terrible path of failure.

I'm sympathetic to your argument, but ultimately they absolutely are fascist. If you doubt me, then to ask a Palestinian. There is very little that the Trump regime is doing that the Democrats weren't doing less obnoxiously and on a much slower timescale.

We can't keep accepting the lesser evil indefinitely. When you brush off the serious issues in the Democratic party with language like "no saints" you make it look like that's exactly what you intend for the country to do. I mean "politicians will be politicians". That's not convincing anymore.

ICE

I've become exactly that petty. There's too much unpunished grift in this world.

What payment terminals? They could go years just being an online credit card. Hell, initially it wouldn't be very different from any company that bills their customers. Start it as a Steam only thing, then add select partners one at a time. It doesn't have to be in your grocery store on day one, or ever really. Fraud detection is easy when you can just yank the game back. Sears couldn't do that when you bought a washing machine. I worked in banking infosec and I have no idea what "digital compliance" means in this context. The hardest compliance standards in this space are PCI, and those are defined and enforced on clients by the payment card industry itself.

Valves internal structure wouldn't scale to that size either

Which is why I specifically said it would be run as a subsidiary.

and they have no experience running a company of the size that would be required in a different structure.

Gosh, where on Earth could they find people with experience running a company that would look like 99% of the companies in existence?

You're just throwing shit on the wall and hoping something sticks. You could neigh say anything, and nothing in the world would ever be accomplished.

they had hundreds of thousands of employees, and they didn't need to deal with all the digital shit we gotta deal with now.

They needed hundreds of thousands of employees because they didn't have "digital shit". Today, the entirety of Discover Financial Services is around 21k, and probably falling.

If Valve did it, it wouldn't be under the Valve organization anyways. It would be a subsidiary, and Valve has plenty of cash-flow to build it out.

I think the point is that Valve has the reach to start their own credit card network. It might be far fetched, but I'm old enough to remember when Sears launched the Discover card. It's totally doable for a company that already has the technical capabilities of Valve.