I’m under the impression all the stuff we send up, for the last 20 years, had an obligation to have scheduled deorbit so that we don’t Wall-E ourselves.

Was that just for spacecraft, not their payloads?

Low-key relieved that the business relocated and was incorporated in the One Star State, juuuuust in case Iran happens to figure out ICBM’s.

I mean, when it’s the “Google button” that also summarizes the screen contents, implying at least some degree of data exfiltration from our devices, I would say so.

Corrected, thank you!

Instead of back and forth arguing with anecdotes about scam mitigation and fraud loss, I will just say that sometimes the laziest approach is also a valuable one.

For example, when steam was required to build out of returns apparatus for one country, they made it available in all countries all at once and became very consistent with their policies, generous even with those policies, about giving returns to unhappy customers about a game they purchased. Hell, about a game that I purchased. I personally have played a game for 2 hours, and then message saying that I didn’t love the game, and got my 20 bucks back to play towards other games. Toys R Us wouldn’t do that in 2006. Best Buy wouldn’t do that in 2012. GameStop would laugh maniacally, spittle flying off of their dancing jowls, before accepting a trade in for a $1.29.

Seen as one of maybe five companies I would trust and give the benefit of the doubt to, when it comes to handling my money and consistently doing right by me as a consumer. I’m sorry that you haven’t had the same experience.

As others have stated, I think Steam making this love nullifies a lot of the bite of the New York lawsuit against them, and while it may starve them of some percent of revenue, and ice out enclaves of customers, it honestly could be a net good for consumers to stave off an entire category of fraud.

There are a lot of corners of society that consider just giving cash still very rude. There are a lot of Kool-Aid drinkers out there.

Worth mention, every Market is very very different. In the US, we tend to think of three very clearly defined Lanes of credit cards, bank accounts, and then all of the weird middlemen products that sit on top of bank accounts like Zelle or Venmo, and we consider all of them either slow, expensive or both. Bank to bank methods are considered the ABS the worst because most of them have been built on top of the ancient, antiquated ACH Network, which basically predated the fax machine and sometimes has 72 hour delays on either end of the transaction.

In much of the world people can just whip out their phones and use their Bank numbers like phone numbers to send $$ point to point, instantly and with zero transaction fees.

I made a friend in another country (while I resided there) who was willing to buy me $200 USD worth of steam wallet funds in their local currency, and I had to pay them with a separate transaction for the favor using PayPal of all things, as if it were 2002. LOL. It was worth it to get at their regional pricing, however it disallowed me from paying for any of my friends games I would normally gift to friends, since Valve wisely restricts cross region gifting and cuts down on a lot of their scam & arbitrage traffic with that.

Tl;Dr - - money comes in dozens, hundreds of different flavors, speeds, and behavior. ALSO, kudos to Valve for being able to think of it in enough dimensions to garner the widest audience possible.

I, too, imagine at least 20% of this is altruism, while realistically I would expect Vance to Valva not lose much of that revenue entirely.~~ ~~

Of all of the ways to populate a steam wallet legitimately, Valve authorizing and paying for those keys to be printed on paper stock, and then distributed across the globe, and maintaining the support apparatus around that entire supply chain, has to cost more overhead versus someone just using their debit account or digital payment processor on the Steam website.

Edit : a word

Largely regional. They were on a rack in half of all the convenience stores I saw in South Korea just last year.

If you don’t mind just a bit of AI , you can use your phone to capture the string of numbers and copy it to your clipboard these days.

It’s lame to trust the machines, but as I age I’m grateful for saving what vision I have left for the actual pixels in my games.

Yep, this.

Adding to this, I want to follow channels and subscribe to creators, without making an account registered on youtube. I already have sponsor block and you block and a bunch of other enhancements for youtube, but it’s hard for me to curate the content that comes my way without having an account signed in.

So I just renamed FreeTube app to YouTube on my desktop machines, and slap the YouTube logo on it, and now it’s logically partitioned from everything else.

I actually do the same thing with a handful of other sites that I traffic frequently, instead of just making a profile for them or a sandboxed container for them. Facebook and Reddit both get summoned either from the start menu or from Mac OS spotlight and at least in theory those browsers that have been renamed and re-icon’d won’t be able to interact with any of my other browsers in any way.

Next step is to learn how to block those domains from my other browsers, and the block all of the domains from those specific rebadged browsers.

But for now, FreeTube is hands down the best game in town if I want to watch, say, the five most recent episodes from Hank Green or Level1 Techs, in a row.

Takes 45 seconds, even in mobile.

One screen to enter email, one quick confirmation, one screen to establish password.

No clue gore much data the correct from browser, but at least the registration is swift and seems private.

I’m looking forward to giving it a whirl. I interact with other humans when sharing and developing documents, so intercompatibility with the office and Office 2003 standards is literally the second most important thing for me, and all of the arbitrary also-ran file formats are a nice to have, not a need to have.

As evidenced by the fact that even the centers can’t get on the same page about what alternative formats they feel should be mandated instead.

*** laughs in Gecko Fusion ***

Right?!? Silly, functioning democracy could have had a kingdom.

I dig KITH, but I love chickens more. Also: identify as dude.

Every time I try to introduce someone to that show we start Ina eaosn own and I think I traumatize them.

Completely unrelated, if you have chickens I hope they are doing splendidly.

World needs a lot more backyard chickens.

Ah, yes, is this a portrait of her advisor?

Worth watching?

VTV is value stocks, so minimal exposure. AND Vanguard Healthcare fund has often had consistent performance across Market Cycles. I haven’t yet found an anti AI portfolio.

I’m looking ex-us for my growth and blended strategies. VXUS and VEA principally.