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”.

Fortunately for them, the public and for-profit media are back to ignoring Aboriginal issues.

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.

Even better, you can just enter them right into spreadsheets so you know exactly how profitable it will be to steal wages from children, even if you get caught.

There’s demonstrably millions of people who are absolutely fine with being assholes, especially if it’s profitable. It doesn’t matter to them in the slightest.

Anybody not being paid a living wage is functionally a slave and the reason this company was using immigrant children is because they could grossly underpay them and pocket the difference.

If it were an option for meat production, they would have just taken the Nestlé approach and used child slaves that were geographically distant enough to be swept under the rug.

But regardless, the company almost certainly won’t be “hit hard”. They’ll be given a slap on the wrist for getting caught and will continue doing deeply fucked things in a deeply fucked industry.

If by some miracle the people responsible are actually punished, there’s still a thousand other companies racing to the bottom because that’s how the system is rigged.

Any company paying suppliers and workers fairly will fold to any competition that doesn’t because few people are paid enough to be able to afford products from people who are paid enough.

It’s a problem far, far deeper than children working at a single factory and I’m not even slightly surprised that a company that feeds live animals into blenders is at the bottom of that hole, furiously digging.

They won’t even get fined more than they profited.

It covers the entire world and includes incidents with only a single victim and is still a shorter list than mass shootings in America this year.

Housing cannot be both affordable and an investment.

Thanks for making the effort.

I can’t personally explain gun control to every person in every thread each time a legal gun owner kills someone.

But that doesn’t mean they should get a pass. These are failures of the system resulting in someone’s death.

And spend any amount of time at a firing range or other organizations for gun owners, and you find a group so conscious about safe use of firearms that to even accidentally point an unloaded and known safe firearm at any other living person for any reason other than self defense can often result in that person being immediately disarmed and lectured.

So in other words, gun safety is entirely optional and the worse you’ll face is some embarrassment if someone calls you on it.

Even in this person’s fantasy, they’ll still hand the gun straight back to the person.

The part where they make sure you can actually drive and revoke your license if you’re a danger to others on the road.

But why try and torture your analogy further? People aren’t driving off cliffs and if they were, we could stop it with stronger barriers and no lobby groups or death cults would fight to stop it.

While I agree with the sentiment, I wouldn’t have killed anybody.

Good people find the idea of ending someone’s life innately abhorrent and will hesitate to do it even if their lives are in danger.

It’s why militaries (arguably) make sure to train it out of people and why abused women and targeted minorities aren’t actually levelling the playing field by carrying a gun with them everywhere.

That said, what you’re describing is one of the major issues with permissive gun laws – it only takes a split second to kill someone (or yourself) with a loaded handgun in arms reach.

They would if America’s requirements for holding a driver’s license were just turning up and a DMV and saying “I pinkie promise I know how to drive and will not drive off a cliff in a murder suicide”.

If you don’t want people who commit murder with legal guns called “legal gun owners”, stop selling them legal guns.

The vast majority of gun owners have never used a gun in an illegal activity

Completely irrelevant. The vast majority of drivers don’t drive when they’re drunk, but we still have DUI laws that apply to everybody.

The reason we have them is because there was a clear pattern where impaired drivers were involved in more accidents that were more fatal, just like legal gun owners and unjustifiable murders.

And of course because the alcohol lobby didn’t think to start a death cult to fight DUI laws to maintain their profits.

enthusiast communities exemplify safe gun use

Entirely optional. The pro-gun community might go online to tut about poor trigger discipline or unsafe storage but they (or the people representing them) staunchly oppose any laws that actually make these things a requirement.

often get a person forcibly disarmed or assaulted to even negligently put another person down the line of the barrel.

At a range or in your imagination. They don’t rush out from behind a couch to scold a domestic abuser for sweeping his wife.

The issue at hand isn’t that gun ownership is legal, the issue is that a (possibly undiagnosed) sociopath or potential psychopath was able to get a firearm

Congratulations, welcome to gun control. Preventing that is 100% the goal of gun control, has always been the goal of gun control and has been hugely effective outside of America.

Generally, this is through gun licensing* with applicants needing to demonstrate they know how to safely store* and operate*, undergo a background check* and often be a member in good standing at a range for at least 6 months*.

These laws also take into consideration the risk of different guns* with semi-automatic weapons involving increased scrutiny* given that they’re the weapon of choice for impulse killings, mass murder and armed robbery.

And of course, this comes with actual punishments* for anyone caught endangering others with their firearms, rather than just getting the frowning of the lifetime from the people who enabled them.

Unfortunately, everything marked with a * is opposed by the pro-gun community who would rather just keep selling guns to criminals, abusers, extremists and 80% of mass shooters instead of making the “responsible” part of “responsible gun owner” mandatory.

But we all know the talking point you’re working towards – the “it’s a mental health problem” bullshit excuse.

Of course the goal of that excuse is to demand something impossible is done before you will even consider gun control – in this case, accessible mental healthcare for every man, woman and child in America that can instantly cure them of complex problems far beyond even the most cutting edge medical science, so completely that they will never relapse for even a minute, delivered within a budget of $0.

But do you know what you’re actually doing? Admitting that the American public are simply not healthy enough for such permissive gun laws to be safe.

So how about we just fix the gun laws without the gun lobby’s stamp of approval and when the pro-gun crowd has finished building their impossible mental health system, they can have them back.

After all, they’ve insisted that they (and they alone) have had the solutions for 25 years now and the only thing they’ve done is dug the country a deeper hole in the name of profit.

Don’t exactly need a microscope to see the wealth of the royal family and you can dedicate an entire museum to the atrocities they comitted to grow it.

You really want someone to say “infinite” though. Do you have a point riding on it?

He was a legal gun owner who used his legal gun to try and execute his wife – something that seldom happens in countries that don’t hand guns out like candy.

Was he not a legal gun owner?

Just legal gun owner things