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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • I mean, seems fair? It’s not like we haven’t seen large scale cyber operations carried out in the past, and not a single one has ever been deemed to rise to being an act of war.

    Unless you’re killing power to hospitals or something, cyber effects seem to be fair play in the modern world stage.

    You think Russias gonna declare war on NATO because they have some IT systems destroyed, or a bunch of records stolen or deleted or whatever? I really completely fail to imagine anything short of the “killing power to a hospital” example that would cause an escalation, and honestly, I’m not even sure that would.

    Russia is happy to do it to other countries. Turnabout seems fair play to me. Especially since they’re doing it while actively committing genocide on a neighboring country.


  • The IP address of the machine you’re connecting to has probably changed. If the previous had a DHCP lease, that wouldn’t migrate with the new router.

    Go on your Windows machine and open up a command prompt. Type in “ipconfig” (no quotes) and validate the machines IP address. It should start with 192 or 10 most likely. Maybe 172.

    If it’s the same as it used to be, that’s not the issue. But my bet is that it’s changed.



  • 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?









  • Interesting. Makes sense.
    I’m sure some re-enter from, like, coinstar machines or something, but that’s gotta be a tiny minority.

    But that seems like another point in favor of discontinuing them. If people who get them literally never use them, seems like a pointless coin, lol.

    But it seems like they’ll probably self eliminate one way or the other over time. I guess the concern would be that they’d self eliminate too quickly, as no one who gets them ever spends them, so basically every distributed penny just instantly vanishes.

    But I think the problems with cutting over will largely just be minor heartache. Like, it’ll be minorly bumpy for a month or two, but by a year out everyone will have figured it out and no one will miss them.



  • People overstate that problem. They say “businesses” as if all businesses are the same.

    Bank of America has 3600 branches in the US. At $20/day, that’s $72k/day, or $26mil a year.

    Bank of America has $3.5 trillion dollars in assets. If they’re making 1% interest on that (they’re making far more than that, I promise), they’re making $35 billion dollars a year. So that $26mil makes up less than a tenth of a percent of their total revenue.

    Compare that to the Walmart example. First, at Walmart people aren’t just buying one thing. If my cart has 50 items in it, that’s a few cents per item. So we’re really talking fifty cents to a dollar per transaction. Second, Walmart has around 40 million customers per day. (About half of the total number of people who even have a Bank of America account, and we know that not even half of account holders are going to a brick and mortar every day.)

    So, a savings of 1¢ per item is a difference of, conservatively (assuming an average cart size of 10 items), $4mil per day, or around $1.5 billion per year. Contrast with the around $26 million from Bank of America.

    They just aren’t comparable examples. At its core, the scale issue that you’re outlining only matters if you’re getting it on a huge number of relevant things it applies to. There just aren’t that many actual cash transactions handled by BoA compared to its overall income numbers. Walmart has a huge number of individual items it sells vs it’s overall income.


  • Fair. We’ll have to see how it plays out. My gut is that the demand probably won’t be there, but we’ll just have to see.

    But to be clear, we’re talking about a brick and mortar bank losing between $10-40 a day. Compared to the overall quantity of money moving through it, that feels like it should be negligible. That’s, like, one to two tellers leaving an hour early.

    But yeah, the way this should be done is through an act of Congress. Agreed on that. This should really be an easy piece of bipartisan legislation, and the fact that Congress is so broken as to be unable to pass it is a huge indictment in its own right.


  • I hear what you’re saying, but I don’t know that I foresee this as more than a niche issue.

    Obviously this is just a gut feeling backed by no data, so it’s worth the paper it’s printed on. But how many pennies were banks giving to non-business customers? I have to believe that it was super negligible.

    The vast majority of pennies were issued to businesses to make change. If businesses stop giving out pennies, how many pennies will the banks be asked to hand out?

    Time will tell for sure, but my gut is that the amount of people hoarding pennies will be wildly offset by businesses getting rid of them.

    And, in your “what if I asked for only 4¢ from the bank” example. The easy solution is that they just give you a nickel and write the penny off as a loss. The penny is just so low value that it wouldn’t add up to an appreciable loss. Again, that’s gut, but the average bank brick-and-mortar does on the order of hundreds or thousands of transactions per day. If they lost 4¢/transaction, that’s only on the order of tens of dollars per day. They lose more to that in miscounts I would imagine.


  • A fair point. A better, more modern example is probably the two dollar bill. They’ll just slowly be pulled out of circulation until they’re no longer common.

    I’m sure businesses will continue to accept pennies. They’ll just start rounding to 5¢ regardless because they’re uncommon, and if someone brings in 5 pennies, they’ll take them, but eventually the federal reserve will have sucked all but a handful out of circulation.