testfactor

Is it possible for Chic-fil-a to ever redeem itself in your eyes?

If they fired everyone involved with every controversy and started donating every cent of profit to LGBT charity groups, would you say they were a good company, or is it once tainted always tainted.

Chic-fil-a has made a lot of changes in the past decade and a half, and I'm of the opinion that, if no amount of self reflection and change can ever make us reconsider our condemnation, then there's no reason for anything to try and change, as it won't stop the hate.

Not that Chic-fil-a is perfect, but I would argue they are now as good or better than any other fast food chain we're not actively hating on. They actually pay their employees more than minimum wage and give them one guaranteed weekend day off if nothing else.

So why continue to put them down now that it's "mission accomplished?" If the goal was for them to change, and they have, it seems that we should bring them back into the fold, no?

Rsync

Sure, many games are tied to various Steam services, but that's by the choice of the games developer. Steam offers various built in services that game devs can choose to use if they want. It's not like it's some kind of requirement.

You might as well complain that game devs use Windows binaries, locking their games to only run on Windows. Sure, I prefer it when they target other platforms, but that's 1000% not Microsoft's fault that the dev chose to dev for their platform. I'm not mad at Microsoft for so many games being Windows only. I'm mad at the devs.

And games that build themselves around Steam services are of course going to be tied to Steam. That's a choice the devs made. If they wanted their game to run without needing the Steam client, they trivially could have built it that way. They just would have had to either reimplement all those Steam features themselves, or done without.

And if people want those Steam features, every store client who wants to run those games would have to implement those features in an interoperable way. It's easy to say "have interoperability between clients," but that's glossing over the potentially thousands of dev hours required to implement all of the features needed. And that's assuming they could all agree on a spec.

And to your final point about being open source. First, it gives very "any musician who gets paid is a sellout" energy. But more than that, it doesn't actually solve the problem you have. Even if Steam open sourced their tooling, that doesn't mean other players in the space could integrate it. Steam has grown organically for the past 30yrs, and trying to extricate the deep inner bits and then graft them on to your own solution isn't as easy as it sounds.

But they aren't tied to a store? When you download a game from Steam, it's just an executable on your box. You could put it on a hard drive and move it wherever you wanted. You don't have to launch games you bought with Steam through Steam. They aren't streamed. They are saved locally to your computer.

You can only download it from that store, sure, but that's not apples to apples. If I buy a game from GameStop, they won't give me another copy for free, just cause I threw away the copy they gave me. Once you download the game, that's what they sold you, and it's notionally your responsibility to keep track of it. Them allowing you to keep downloading new copies forever isn't strictly necessary, and costs them money every time you do it.

And if you can run the games you downloaded without Steam, all you're saying is "there should be other places to buy your games." But there are. Those exist. Less people use them, sure, but what do you propose? Kill Steam because too many people use it to buy their games? Legislate that people are required to shop at other stores?

But this game is getting distribution through GoG and about a half dozen other platforms listed in the article.

Do most people game through steam? Yes. But centralization of the marketplace isn't necessarily a bad thing. There's a reason why people complain when they have to use other game stores an launchers. It's the "I have 50 different streaming services" problem.

If Steam starts abusing that market position, then yes, we should care about that and they should suffer backlash. Which makes the question of "did they do the right thing here," very much relevant.

While preventable child deaths are obviously terrible, I feel like this could be overextended.

Like, how many child deaths has McDonald's caused vs guns. I'm too lazy to do the math like the other guy, but I'd presume it's comparable. (Although I suppose by the time it catches up to them they're no longer children.)

Idk, you see things like, "leading cause of death in children" and it makes the number seem huge, but it's less than 100 kids a year. And it looks like around 400/yr die from drowning in swimming pools. So if we really care about the children, we should bad swimming pools? They kill 4x the number of kids than guns.

I'm not saying guns are great. But using child deaths as part of the argument just feels like a great excuse to ban literally anything you just don't like.

Even in your made up scenario it doesn't prove the negative. Maybe your mind reading didn't work because Apple has a mind wiping device that made them forget. Maybe the crystal ball didn't work because Apple made an even more powerful "crystal ball blocking" device. You can't prove that's not what's really happening.

So no, you in fact can't prove a negative.

As an example, the lawsuit alleged that Faust and other white, male farmers are charged a $100 "administration fee" to participate in one program that exempts women and minority farmers from paying the same fee. In another example, Faust "participates in a USDA program that guarantees 90% of the value of loans to white farmers, but 95% to women and racial minorities," according to the report.

While I'm not exactly sympathetic to the "plight of the white man," it is a little weird (if true) that the USDA can have a "white men only fee" for some programs.

My understanding was that most DEI initiatives were built around breaking up old-boys-clubs by requiring preference for minority businesses when all other factors are considered equal. The above doesn't really feel like that.

Other countries don't enshrine freedom of speech the way the US does. In many countries certain types of political speech are outlawed.

They probably don't have the warehouse capacity to store all those extra units. There's a lot of logistics involved in housing and shipping 2.2mil consoles, and "just wait" can be way harder than you would think.