Action_Bastid

Is he being removed completely from government service or just being reshuffled? I vaguely remember reading awhile back how Ukraine had sort of adopted a bit of a process of shuffling around military leaders to help prevent them from getting too entrenched and allowing opportunities for corruption to really take root, but I don't know if that's still the case or applicable here?

He does very much need to have the corporate veil pierced for his actions with regards to Meta and some actual investigations done of his own personal behavior, because dude is very clearly endorsing some behavior that he realistically might be thrown in prison for.

Microsoft have already erased everyone's library once before when they shut down the original Games for Windows store. They already have a track record of showing they're perfectly willing to yank everyone's licenses and shut everything down until they decide they actually they do want to be in the games space again.

Game Pass is already their second attempt at this, and there are a lot of people who don't trust them not to rug pull again.

If they do a print to order thing, I could see it maybe working out as a cool side business. Or it could be a chance for them to go really harder into the vintage games market if they can get some publishers on board or get the rights to some older stuff. Doesn't seem like a winning market though on a mass market front, more just a form of advertising or a specialty service for physical collectors.

Unless you're worried that Steam Machine actually going to be a viable competitor to Xbox and Sony now that they've both also raised prices and dropped physical distribution. They lost two more big draws to their ecosystems and neither Sony or Microsoft have nearly as good a reputation for managing online stores.

Helps to push the angle that steam machines are "unreliable".

It's the ultimate push to turn everything into the perfect Capitalist (not market-oriented) business solution: Getting paid for nothing

If your goal is to accumulate capital, and there are not outside forces regulating your worst impulses, you ultimately will create a class of legal-protected thieves, since the absolutely best and most risk free way to accumulate capital is to be given it in exchange for quite literally nothing.

Gambling is about as close to the platonic ideal as you can, but conquest by military force of political capture is also a very, viable route. Use the law to force people to buy your nothing and be protected for it, rather than being lynched when you steal someone's products.

I'll disagree very slightly.

It's not that buggy games didn't exist in the past. It's the buggy games failed a lot harder in the past. There was tons and tons of garbage. Lots of people ended up with a piece of shovelware that grandma bought from the bargain bin at the local game store for Christmas. It's just that back that the scam was more stealing out of the pockets of publishers than the general audiences, since those types of games were typically sold to the publisher outright back in the day, rather than having a dev split.

Yes, but have you considered that the Supreme Court doesn't care and wants instead to allow religious activists (like themselves) to disregard prior precedent and other religious beliefs in favor of enshrining their own personal beliefs as civil law? It's really rather unfair of you to not consider their personal beliefs, which says they should be able to impose theirs and ignores yours, y'know.

He's Ronald Reagan, except this time there isn't a Nancy in place to tell the secret service to fill the pool with leaves.

You need to find yourself some Left-Libertarians.

You're usually looking for some type of Georgists or some flavor of small-scale Social/Communist Anarchy. Most of them are way more able to grok the concepts of things like "natural monopolies" or "Tragedy of the Commons" and other fun market failure states. They tend to focus more on the existence of the market itself as a tool for creating competition that drives innovation and efficiency while giving less lip service to the idea that just because you accumulated a bunch of capital from an idea that's its a good idea.

If I scam a bunch of people, I've gathered a bunch of capital, but that doesn't mean I've actually produced anything of value for anyone. If I refined chemicals in my house and dumped all the waste in my neighbor's pool, I'm not actually competing in an even market, because I've burdened my neighbor with the cost of waste remediation while I get to keep all the profit.

Historical legacy. It made sense when they were first rolling out. Someone would take the risk of trying to build up a market for these really expensive new devices and then the factory would swoop in and undercut them and destroy their business after they had done all the initial leg work of creating demand for the vehicles. They wanted protection from this.

Well, cars are now everywhere in the US market and it doesn't take a whole lot of effort anymore to convince someone they need a car, and not just a horse. But the laws protecting "car market development" in the former of dealerships never went away.