Is he robbing us to pay for the war, or was this war just an excuse to rob us and enrich himself from the start?

A while ago I read an article written by a college student going to school to create comic books. Unfortunately I can’t find it now.

They said that in the classes about drawing, those professors said it was perfectly fine to use AI to help with writing your stories and dialogue, but warned how incredibly dangerous it can be to use even as inspiration to draw.

Their writing professors, on the other hand, told them it was perfectly fine to use AI to help with their illustrations, but that it was incredibly dangerous to use to even generate outlines or rough drafts when it came to writing.

AI is only ever good enough when you don’t know better.

Ironically it is often local governments pressuring these companies to force the return.

When companies look for places to open offices, they functionally put out bids and make cities compete against each other for the best deal. They promise that they’ll bring tons of high paying office jobs to whichever city gives then the most tax breaks and other benefits. These cities bend over backwards to attract these companies. Once they “win”, the cities might even try to incentivize developers to build around the office, creating commercial and retail spaces for these office workers to eat and shop. Services like mechanics, lawyers, salons, gyms, daycare. While eceonmic ecosystems might be built around the idea that one of the big-4 accounting firms has an office there. Hotels spring up to accomodate business travelers visiting.

Then all of a sudden that company let’s everyone work from home. All of those businesses dry up, although a lot of the demand might get redistributed to the nearby residential areas where those workers are working from now. But then, without the restriction of physical space, the company hires more and more remote workers in other countries instead. The company may be registered locally and may have their servers there, but the city already gave them tons of tax breaks. All that’s left is an empty glass building that doesn’t generate tax revenue, and a ghost town of extinct small businesses around it.

So the local politicians apply all the pressure they can to executives to keep employees in the office.

I don’t mean to excuse any of this. The whole thing is a mountain of fragile and shortsighted decisions, and we are absolutely better off working remotely. Building communities and economies where we live, rather than where we work.

You’re just proposing a much more drastic and rapid change than I am. I agree that a wealth tax would be a more immediate effect. It is also much more drsstixnand far less tested. The idea is interesting and I am neither opposed to it nor calling for it. I do not think it it necessary.

Increasing income tax rates and corporate tax rates would be a much slower approach. I didn’t mention them, but I would also add in property tax rates and capital gains. Luxury sales taxes, inheritancd taxes. In the US, make OASDI a progressive instead of regressive tax.

For existing billionaires, there are plenty of laws they’ve already broken to get where they are that just need to be enforced. Wage theft, antitrust, union busting, fraud. The SEC should have buried Musk in a dungeon years ago. So I see the answer to eliminating existing wealth being fines rather than taxes.

Of course, there is also room to increase the minimum wage and minimum benefits. That would hell redistribute wealth too.

I don’t know Gabe Newell, or even anyone who works at Valve personally, but every account I have ever read about Valve is that they usually treated and paid their employees well. Investigate all of these megacorps and prosecute appropriately.

Taxing billionaires is not some new and untested concept. In the US throughout the 1900’s the highest income tax brackets were often in the 70%'s, reaching into the 90%'s at times, and we did not see what you are suggesting.

Increasing the taxes on Gabe Newell’s profits from owning Valve would not suddenly cause him to lose money, just to gain less money. If corporate taxes and income taxes were increased across the board, then it is not as if he would benefit from selling Valve stock to invest elsewhere, and Valve would not be a more or less attractive place to invest relative to other options either. I am not sure why you think this would cause Gabe Newell to back out or investors to jump in. Heck, these rates have all changed pretty frequently within Valve’s existence and have not had a significant impact.

Also just to say, there is also the matter of jurisdiction as he lives in New Zealand while Valve is a US based company.

1. Taxing those outside investors too
2. Taxing Valve as a corporation more, making them less profitable and less attractive to said investors.
3. I’m not even convinced this would be an issue at all really. Remember Valve is not publicly traded. I suspect Gabe would hold on to controlling ownership as long as it was profitable, and remember that taxes are usually on profits.
4. Even if outside investors move in and enshittify, the moment they start doing anticompetitive you hit them with antitrust suits. Not to mention the industry can also be regulated even before all this: a lot of governments are cracking down on lootboxes already.

Even if Valve’s offering sucked, I still have not seen anyone point out a business practice I would call anticompetitive. They are not buying up studios or publishers, or even paying for timed exclusivity. I have not seen any hint that they are colluding with competitors on prices or fees. I haven’t seen then accused of stealing IP or poaching personnel. They readily welcome Microsoft and Sony to release games on Steam, and they have released their own games on consoles including the Switch. They let you install Windows or whatever else on the Deck, if you want to for some reason.

Billionaires should not exist, and Gabe Newell is no exception. He should be taxed more. I don’t love one company having so much control of this space. But I also don’t want to have a dozen different crappy launchers from different companies to deal with. There are a lot of benefits to the user to having everything centralized in one place.

All of your problems seem to be with things outside of OnlyFans.

It combines the sexual exploitation of mainstream porn with the economic exploitation of the gig economy

A quote directly from one of the articles you linked that I think hits the nail on the head. The problem is capitalism. The workers of OnlyFans are being exploited in the same way that Uber drivers are. Honestly, in a similar manner to how baristas and programmers and oil riggers and everyone else working under capitalism is. That’s why I’m not sad that this billionaire owner died.

The other problems you mention are problems on other platforms. It sounds like whatever dating app you are using has a problem with people using it to advertise their business- I think it’s the responsibility of the dating app to crack down on such misuse and give users a mechanism to report that.

If your Facebook feed is full of OF ads… Well first of all you should get off of Facebook because it’s terrible, but also Meta should crack down on what advertising they allow and how. Or maybe… You’re in the tiny minority if people who care?

Other platforms have tools to address similar issues. I always laugh when people complain about seeing adult content on Steam because that is turned off by default- you need to dig through your store preferences to allow that. The old LemmyNSFW instance had different communities- some allowed or even encouraged OF creators, while others banned them. That seemed to work well. I haven’t paid as much attention to FediNSFW and it’s probably still forming those sorts of structures, but I expect them to be there eventually.

I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect OnlyFans to have any sort of say in where and how creators advertise on other platforms. Such restriction wood be draconian.

Brother I do that every day and I’m an accountant

“Back in my days the women of porn were properly underpaid and fully exploited to do exactly what I wanted for way cheaper!”

I’m not mourning the death of a billionaire. And sure, the advertising of pornographic content could probably use a bit of regulation… Heck, that probably applies to advertising more broadly. But I’m not upset that sex workers today have alternatives to working with sketchy producers. I’d rather a #girlboss spam Facebook (which you shouldn’t be using in 2026 anyways) than a GirlsDoPorn situation.

Congratulations!

One of the most important pieces of Trump’s 2024 election was getting the Hispanic vote. Sure, he spent years before, during, and after his first term talking about cracking down on immigration on the southern border, talking about how all of the people coming from Mexico or further south were a bunch of criminals and drug dealers. BUT he courted the Cuban population in southern Florida - mostly the descendants of people who were wealthy enough to have their wealth redistributed by Castro. By calling Harris a communist he was able to get their votes, win Florida, and that would have made the difference in the election.

The very concept of who counts as “white” changes depending on what the racists of the time want. In the not-too-distant past, Irish and Italian people were not considered white. I still don’t know if Bernie Sanders or other Jews are considered white or not.

Even for data like this… Is it really a black women vs white women issue, or is it a rich person vs poor person issue? And yes, those economic division have deep roots in the history of racism, but that doesn’t explain the whole picture.

Look at the people around Trump. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is one of those Cuban south Floridians. Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer is a Hispanic woman. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is part Samoan, born in Somoa. FBI Director Kash Patel is Indian - his family fled persecution in Uganada.

And then there’s foreign policy. Trump seems to largely be pushing the USA away from predominantly white European countries that have historically been allies. Trying to break up NATO and undermine the EU, making threats against Canada and Greenland. Cozying up to Muhammed Bin Salman.

The people in power love when the masses fight amongst themselves.

I honestly am starting to think the anti-vaxx crowd has been astroturfed by pharmaceutical corporations in order to convince the general public that anyone who questions Big Pharma is some loomy who thinks vaccines cause autism wants to drink raw milk.

I remember when I was a child and I first got experience with computers. I saw how file systems worked and thought to myself “wow I should structure my own mind this way so I can try to think as well as a computer can!”. I may have autism.

AI is the exact opposite. Taking something beautiful, clear, clean, organized, efficient, definitive. And inserting all the messy, sloppy, uncertain, unreproducible aspect of our bloody electric meat brains. It’s a move in the opposite direction of where I think humanity should be going.

What about 1870 then?

I never claimed Uber was 100% safe. There’s also plenty of cases of non-sexual assault and robbery. There’s way more cases of simple negligent driving resulting in injury and death.

Uber’s own data indicates 99.9998% of trips in 2021-2022 were completed with no safety incident. Now if you want to discredit that self-reporting as biased, fair enough.

What would you say is the threshold for justifying gender segregation? 99.9999%? 99.99999%? 99.999999%?

Transphobes will use any excuse to be transphobic.

I’m not sure what your point here is.

That is always where the argument goes. That is what the Christian Fundamentalists that u/ZILtoid1991 was referring to are calling for. It starts with claiming that this is some huge problem plaguing whatever country they are in, and inevitably leads down the road of invading privacy and authoritarian control.

Prior to Christian fundamentalists influencing the academic world in the last couple decades, there used to be a distinction between “addiction” and things like “compulsory behaviors” or “habits”.

Alcohol has physiological withdrawal symptoms.

Calling this out is not to undermine those who have real behavioral issues, but to highlight the malicious influence of these very real and VERY well-funded groups. This isn’t some conspiracy theory- there are plenty of documents from government agencies about how sexual restriction and shame is used to control people. The Islamic State pretty famously used this in their recruiting and training programs to radicalize people.

The fault lies not with porn, but with societal repression of sexuality. There will always be people who have behavioral issues- most of which are not sexually related. And any well-functioning society should have the resources available to help those people.

Here’s a person “addicted” to eating drywall. Should we pass laws mandating age verification for purchasing construction materials now? Should we make a bunch of apps with sketchy security to help people track their drywall eating habits?

I’m comparing gender identity to other forms of protected identity: race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc.

I’m not making any judgements about any group being superior or inferior to another. You’re the one doing that. Being “physically imposing” is subjective and variable. There is significant overlap between the largest women and smallest men, and that’s just staying withing the confines of binary cis people. Not to mention… Guns exist. Cars themselves are weapons far more dangerous than any human regardless of gender.

Building a just society means we need to leave behind our biases and fears. To judge individuals not on the circumstances of their birth but the content of their character. That means discarding the luxury of pre-judging people, not just when it is easy, but also when it is hard.