they can give millions in subsidies direct to corporations

That’s exactly why they’re fighting it – every dollar they give to poor people is a dollar less they can give to rich people.

Steam got to where it is by good will, good prices and good features.

Well, eventually.

When Steam was first released, the running joke was “steaming pile of shit”. It was slow, unreliable and only a couple of shades of green away from the worst color in the world. People complained about the birth of “always online” games and about paying full price but not even getting a box with it.

It’s not exactly unassailable now either. It’s my platform of choice as a user but for indie developers, the 30% cut is brutal and last I used it, the Steamworks SDK was pretty rough. The app itself also has a lot of legacy bloat like a built in MP3 player.

It’s ahead of the rest but I think “good will, good prices and good features” might be an overly romantic take on “it’s where all my games already are”.

The important part was that you got the far-right talking point out there.

That’s incompatible with corporate greed. They will look at a billion transactions for $0.05 and start thinking “What if each of those was $0.50? Or $5.00? Or $50.00?”.

Without a regulating force (such as laws or consumer power that isn’t just neoliberal lies) , it will always grow to absorb every available dollar it can.

And realistically, charging people 0.045€ for the service they actually use won’t make them nearly as rich as charging people $50 each month for the $3 dollars they use.

They’ve already done the maths to prove it. It’s why it’s never happened.

With any change on the site formerly known as Twitter, there are 3 lenses to examine it through:

1. Reducing the massive financial loss that Musk will almost certainly take
2. Amplifying the voice of the far-right
3. Stroking the ego of the man child who owns it

This is probably mostly 1. He’s looked at the number of users and said “what if they were dollars?”.

But like you say, there’s probably a bit of 2. Reactionaries are more likely to hand over a dollar for a Truth Social with outside their choir to abuse.

It probably won’t dissuade bots and astro-turfing, but it will make it pay-to-play, with the richest welding the most influence. That’s definitely 3 since by any other metric besides money, Elon is average.

I can only approve of people paying for services they use. It isn’t free to run. But there are several things to consider:

I don’t mind paying for services, but I now have 20 different services. Each one is trying to extract the maximum amount of money out of me while giving me a minimum in return.

I also accept that those services are not free to run, but realistically, these companies aren’t just trying to cover their operating costs, they’re trying to further line the pockets of executives and shareholders.

And its never enough for them. I could give Twitter $100 a month and they’d still sell my data for a few extra pennies. I could give YouTube an unlimited supply of servers and bandwidth and they’d still show just as many ads.

We will never get the cost living under control until this corporate greed is addressed because no matter how much money we pay people, there’s an army of psychopaths ready to milk them of every cent.

So fuck em. They can have an extra dollar when they can prove it will actually end up in the pocket of an employee. Otherwise, the richest man in the world can fund his own little reactionary pet project.

Also they literally go on killing sprees.

This isn’t skepticism, this is actual experience machining parts.

At no point have I suggested that CNC machining gun parts is impossible nor that no desktop printers are capable of it.

I have very specifically challenged people who appear to have no experience machining parts but nevertheless insist it’s no more difficult than printing your homework.

It’s a lie that’s used to undermine gun control and you’re repeating it verbatim.

Your insults are even worse than your hot takes. Are you sure you want to branch out into armchair psychology as well?

I doubt the information needed to accurately predict their costs is publicly available.

But they announced $29.2 billion in revenue in 2022. That’s about as much as countries like Australia, Canada and Italy spent on their entire military.

And that’s just money. Google is absolutely aware of how much indirect value there is in the internationally recognised brand and near total capture of a communication medium.

So again, who exactly am I supposed to feel sorry for? Who is supposed to be suffering? It’s not their staff. It’s not their shareholders. It’s not their suppliers.

They pay a lot of creators fuck all, despite the platform being nothing without them. Will the extra revenue be going to them? Because nobody has mentioned them in any of their guilt trips so far.

As far as I can tell, I’m supposed to feel morally obligated to listen to KFC advertisements at ear splitting volume every 2 minutes for the privilege of watching a video that will make the creator nothing so that some of the wealthiest people in the world can grow wealthier.

To put it bluntly, that’s corporate propaganda.

What is this, early 2000s internet?

Wasn’t a thing on my 2000s internet. Maybe it’s just because you were 3?

Fuck off dude, you’re irrelevant, stop acting like the world is ending because you could never figure out how to turn on a printer.

I’m sure that would have really hurt my feelings if I knew absolutely nothing about myself.

The world wasn’t better when you were young, your shitty attitude is evidence of that.

Not a thing I actually claimed and not actually evidence of the thing I never claimed. Do you need me to put it in a Spongebob Squarepants meme for you?

Whatever helps you self soothe kid.

But the funniest part of all of this, is that I wasn’t even talking about Andrew Tate supporters. They were an example of the embarrassingly stupid shit that people believe, despite your claims that the internet has made everybody better informed than pre-internet relics.

And I could pull out 100 more examples. They supported a president that suggested injecting bleach or “finding a way to get sunlight inside the body” as potential COVID cures both before and after. They’ve literally killed people based on the cold-reading of a shit-tier, 4chan Nostradamus. There are people who genuinely believe the earth is flat. There is a sitting politician that talks about “Jewish space lasers” and “peach tree dishes” and people donate money to help her keep her job.

But you can’t, because you don’t actually know shit about the world before the internet, the people who lived in it or if the claims about them you pulled from your ass will hold up to even the slightest scrutiny.

Do you not remember the Christian groups of the… 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s? They always have, you just weren’t informed via the internet about it.

Oh yeah, you’re clearly talking about Andrew Tate followers and have been this whole time. Good lie you fucking clown. The internet has clearly made you smarter.

Okay, so you don’t actually know who you’re talking about, but you’re certain you’re correct.

I was giving you the benefit of the doubt in case it was a miscommunication and we were talking about entirely different groups of people.

But nope, you’re just saying any old bullshit with absolute conviction because you want to look like the smartest person in the room.

Reading back, it’s actually pretty obvious that you didn’t experience Reagan nor the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s. You’re just extrapolating your 5 years of adulthood backwards 50 years and assuming you’ve nailed it.

Every single piece of apologism here casually pushes the idea that YouTube isn’t profitable and their poor staff are starving.

In 2020, YouTube gleefully declared they were generating $5 billion in ad revenue every 3 months.

Even after their bandwidth, storage and incredibly well paid engineers, there’s no way they’re burning that much money on expenses. That’s a billion dollars – 1000 million – per data center, per quarter. Enough to buy half of the CPUs leaving Intel’s factories

They’re not attacking ad blockers because they’re struggling to make ends meet as they hack away in their garage.

They’re doing it because there is no amount of money that can quench the greed of their shareholders.

And there’s you, grovelling at their feet.

I think all of these are refinements of the same sleazy, manipulative tactic that is growing more effective with each iteration.

Newspapers pushing xenophobia is about as old as newspapers themselves. But you had to actually buy the newspaper then actively sit down and read it, which isn’t a great start if you want to build an army of deliberately misinformed idiots.

Then we had your hate radio. Not only was it free, people could just let it passively wash over them, absorbing opinions like a sponge, unable to take a moment to think critically about what was just said, even if they cared to.

But even the worst of them struggled to openly advocate white supremacy and genocide.

That was left to extremists spreading xeroxed propaganda and they struggled to find an audience. They often targeted things like punk gigs, searching for an angry, disaffected group of young white men, instead finding a kick in the head from people who would be considered “woke” today.

Fortunately for people with dogshit where their personality should be, 24 hour reactionary TV was here to escalate things. With its constant barrage of flashing lights and blaring stingers, it was a struggle to ignore for even a second.

Bigotry was no longer just an opinion, it was full blown entertainment. But underneath it all the careful stage management and production value, you could see them seething at being unable to go mask off.

The internet eventually became accessible enough that they found it and for a while, they were so excited. They could say whatever vile shit they wanted! Their friends and family would never find out! Nobody could punch them!

But they had all the same pitfalls as the newspapers did. People needed to actively seek them out and people just weren’t typing “top ten reasons it’s cool to be a Nazi” into AskJeeves.

Sites like Stormfront tried their old tricks, “raiding” other forums to spam propaganda, but it was so easy to mop up. They struggled to get their misinformation out there without making it clear it was just 12 people with 80 IQs on a warm who couldn’t regulate their emotions.

Then social media arrived to give them everything they wanted, short of an ethnostate and a wife that was too scared to say no. It was passive, it was entertainment and you could say whatever horrific shit you wanted without worrying about repercussions in the form of violence or bad PR.

It took them a while to figure things out at first. Initially they tried just openly admitting they were white supremacists but quickly found platforms wouldn’t tolerate that. And so the “alt-right” was invented and they insisted they weren’t neo-nazis, they just happened to have the same opinions, talking points, figureheads and tattoos.

That plausible deniability took them to dizzying new heights. They were on the news! People were listening to their opinions and then not spitting on them! They were so confident, when “Unite the Right” came around, they tore off their masks, grabbed their tiki torches, paraded around with their swastika flags then killed an innocent woman for disagreeing with them in an act of domestic terrorism.

Which is when they learned they’re not as bulletproof as they thought. They were immediately fired, disowned and deplatformed. But the lesson they learned wasn’t “don’t be genocide promoting fuckstains”, it was to always stay mask on, no matter what. To cling to that plausible deniability even in the face of the most damning evidence to the contrary.

From that, the modern reactionary movement was born.

You just use social media to feed them a constant stream of talking points, “jokes” and trigger words, denying it the whole time. They’ll self-select and signal boost their favourites, form their own little incestuous relationships and get pushed deeper into culthood, guided by the gentle hand of “the algorithm”.

No, hard stop. Not even fucking close.

Articulate the group of people you’re talking about then so we can actually discuss them, rather than you just insisting they’re everything you pinkie promise they were.

Because you’re awful confident about who they are, what their numbers are, what they believed and how much power they weilded without actually articulating who “they” are in any meaningful way.

What grade and type of metal is required for a gun? GCode.

Best of luck with your gun.

I’m aware it’s possible to CNC gun parts and have never claimed otherwise. But isn’t it just fascinating how all the people insisting its how easy and cheap it is have never actually machined anything?

I’ve got no idea why you’re saying that like it makes you correct.

Andrew Tate is a role model for millions of boys and young men.

Okay, maybe they don’t have the context needed to understand that he’s just a rapist who is desperately trying to pretend his father’s abuse was love in disguise.

But the man claimed he was the world’s first trillionaire. That’s the kind of lie a literal toddler would tell, yet grown men believed it.

Are they the majority? No, probably not.

But I can’t remember another group of people so deliberately, unapologetically stupid as modern reactionaries, nor a time where they’ve wielded so much power.