Mine came on when I was about 12 years old and I'm convinced it was brought on by severe anxiety.
At the time my life had changed dramatically. My parents split. Moved to an area adjacent to government housing projects, through which I had to travel everyday to school, and I was, by virtue of unfortunately being wrong color, beaten daily by gangs of hooligans. I ended up sneaking through a slightly wooded area like a South American guerilla until they caught me there.
I couldn't handle it as I was already a sensitive kid and, the parent I ended up with, the other having gone to jail, was compassionless due to their own horrific upbringing. So I had no way of coping which led to total breakdowns and anxiety attacks.
Tinnitus reared it's ugly head soon after which further exacerbated the anxiety.
But the correlation is all speculation on my part because my parent only took me to the doctor a year or so later after much complaining. And only for the tinnitus, not the crippling anxiety.
They don't have to do this. The cheap materials in the compressor or cheap capacitors used on the power supply board will just silently fall. And the cost to repair the problem, for the average person, will be slightly less than just buying a newer version of the crap that just broke.
My LG refrigerator recently stopped cooling. The error code suggested it was the defrost mechanism. It was more of a hassle of a repair than I wanted to take on so I found an authorized repair shop on the LG site and opted for their flat rate repair.
First trip the repairman replaced all of the defroster parts and sensors. It failed again with the same code 18 hours later. The second time he replaced the main board and at least one other part. It now works great and I have effectively a new fridge aside from the compressor for less than $400.
Compressor still has three years of warranty left and we expect to move before then. It can (hopefully) be someone else's problem.
Why bother tracking just the cars? Just track every person. When you're born some government agent can implant a tracker in your sphincter. When a car is stolen, they arrest everyone in the area where the crime occurred and then sort it out downtown.
If you've got nothing to hide, then you shouldn't object to having a sphincter implant to track your every movement. And if you happen to be in an area during a crime, you'll certainly be vindicated, so just a little inconvenience in order to ensure that no car will ever be stolen again.
And just think how environmentally friendly that'll be. Maybe people will stop having so many babies to protect their sphincters from being implanted. That'll be super good for the environment.
I agree. If it only exists so that a select few can actually experience, it might as well not exist at all.
And don't kid yourself, those keepers and creators get full access as well as anyone they deem worthy enough. The rest of us will never be granted that access.
If it's privately funded, good. It affects me nil. But if they take public funds and lock up history or nature just so it can remain pristine for the wealthy or elite to enjoy, then I don't want to have to pay for it. Not that I have a choice in the matter either way.
I don’t know about museums near you, but most museums I’ve been to internationally are free to enter and to see most of their exhibits. They’ll often have much more in their collections than what’s on display, but they’re absolutely still a public good.
We also have a responsibility to preserve stuff from the past for future generations. As our ancestors have done for us.
Interesting idea of free museums. I can't think of one museum I've ever been to that did not require purchasing a ticket. Granted, in my limited travels abroad, it has been for work with no time for that kind of thing, so my experience is solely with museums in the US.
Many museums in the UK are nominally free (although they encourage a donation) and they charge for special exhibitions. A few in France are free. Can't speak to more broadly. (And, yes, free museums are pretty uncommon in the US although they exist--especially at universities, most of the Smithsonian Museums, and so forth.) Fairly broad experience even if it's often been in conjunction with work travel.
Most museums in the US charge admission, but have free days once in a while. Often every Tuesday or some such. I've also seen free days that go with local community events.
Freedom of speech existed before almost everything. Before the wheel, before the airplane, before newspapers, before radio and TV, and even before pen and paper. I wonder how much less free we'd feel if those things were banned as well?
If your ego is elevated in anyway, you might want to work on yourself a bit.
Ground yourself and don't focus on whether or not you are better than someone else. Just be content that you're not better, not worse, not the same, not different, just a person.
Everybody on the planet knows that the modern cellphone is really just a portable vacuum connected directly to people's wallets and steam doesn't want a piece of that action?
They must be raking in the dough if they are ignoring that opportunity.
You can't make money from gacha that's the difference.
I can put real money into Genshin Impact but it's just a sink.
In Steam you can actually make money with the skin gambling or just by simply day trading. I've built my first gaming PC back in 2017 from selling CS cases alone (~$800 back then)
I just bought low and sold high and I already had some older cases that were going up in price.
Once I had my target achieved, in my case that was +$700 at least in my Steam account, I bought some
very popular CS knives, iirc 3 with each of them going +$250
Then moved those knives to a 3rd party gambling/trading site (thanks to the SteamAPI provided by Valve).
And then sold the knives there for real money and cashed out with simple bank transfer.
Few days later bought my first gaming PC.
Nothing have changed ever since and you can still turn your Steam account money into real cash with 3rd party sites.
It's the whole ecosystem, Valve selling keys (making $1b in 2023 alone [0]) and the numbers are only going up since [1]
On top of that they take a cut form every single transaction so even just people selling cases between each other makes Valve a fuckton of money.
And there are the 3rd party sites which are running on the SteamAPI where people can bet these cases, keys, and skins on CS matches. It's an insane system running freely without any oversight from anyone
I think it is reasonable option to not compete in those markets largely controlled by existing players.
Especially when they really are rolling in money from selling desktop games. Taking 20% and courts most likely won't stop them as they do not control the platforms.
Yeah, that is strange, especially since we now have the technology to actually play full blown PC versions via abstraction layers on Android phones. A steam store with existing games on mobile is now possible.
To nitpick, you mean "unfettered capitalism". As in no government involvement. Which has the identical problem to unfettered anarchy: coalitions form, creating governments. Since many markets have network effects (e.g. bulk purchasing gives lower price per unit) a monopoly tends to be one of the possible steady state solutions. But any monopoly can choose to become a governor of their market, being able to impose regulation even through means other than government (e.g. pull resources, poach, lawsuits, or even decide to operate at a loss until the competition is dead (i.e. "Silicon Valley Strategy").
I just mention this because it's not a problem exactly limited to capitalism. It's a problem that exists in many forms of government and economics (like socialism). It just relies on asymmetric power
Yup. It's quite obvious that such unfettered, true capitalism quickly decays to the good ol' rule of warlords.
There should be a name for this kind of fallacy, where you look at a snapshot of a dynamic system (or worse, at initial conditions), and reason from them as if they were fixed - where even mentally simulating that system a few time steps into the future makes immediately apparent that the conditions mutate and results are vastly different than expected.
At the time my life had changed dramatically. My parents split. Moved to an area adjacent to government housing projects, through which I had to travel everyday to school, and I was, by virtue of unfortunately being wrong color, beaten daily by gangs of hooligans. I ended up sneaking through a slightly wooded area like a South American guerilla until they caught me there.
I couldn't handle it as I was already a sensitive kid and, the parent I ended up with, the other having gone to jail, was compassionless due to their own horrific upbringing. So I had no way of coping which led to total breakdowns and anxiety attacks.
Tinnitus reared it's ugly head soon after which further exacerbated the anxiety.
But the correlation is all speculation on my part because my parent only took me to the doctor a year or so later after much complaining. And only for the tinnitus, not the crippling anxiety.