Motherlover or Dick in a Box could both work here.

I mean isn’t this post kind of giving consent?

I’m afraid if I offer suggestions I’ll start getting knocks on my door at 2am.

Came here to say this.

Pretty sure most of the time the password is expired or invalidated, as you said, but whoever vibe coded the system was too lazy, too dumb, or too terrified of being blamed for the frustration of changing a password, that they think it is better to put ALL the frustration on the user.

Whatever the reason, I fucking hate them.

So my experience accounts for nothing?

So even though I’ve lost access to multiple titles because other software companies can’t get their shit together and were a terrible experience, I’m not allowed to use that as an example of why Valve has become the standard?

But any argument against your opinion is “simping”.

Do you even hear yourself?

What you are doing is a form of manipulation and gaslighting.

Those things Valve was sued over were also industry standard practices.

Your argument is awash with emotional outbursts which tells the real story here.

You’ve picked a side for one reason or another and just make bad arguments, trying to support it.

Show me a single game company, of that size, that HASN’T been sued. Since that seems to be your metric of what makes a company so evil.

This is a very narrow viewpoint that is borderline disingenuous.

You blame OP for being a simp, BECAUSE OF A MEME, then argue the plaintiff’s narrative without any critical breakdown or context.

You are not any better.

There is a lot of nuance here that you just ignore.

Valve is not using their resources to prevent/undermine competition.

Valve’s percentage is absolutely worthy of debate, but does not make them a monopoly.

I will state that I support Valve when it comes to the big releases, but definitely wish they tiered their fees to support smaller developers.

I get why they do it, but I wish they were a bit friendlier to the smaller developers

If the other companies used a platform that was even remotely close to the ease of use as Steam, I might feel differently, but they don’t

I have lost access to several titles because of these companies’ “competing” platforms.

Valve provides a service that is critical and beneficial. And in a way that these other companies seem incapable or unwilling to provide.

They are not preventing them from doing it in any way.

They just don’t want to get undercut on products that use their service. That is a valid argument.

Maybe if other companies didn’t create such bloated, underperforming crapware, they wouldn’t feel forced to use Steam.

And smaller developers aside, these companies already suck so much money out of the user/buyer as they can and are not passing that revenue to the actual software developer, while Valve does share its revenue with its employees, despite your claim that Gabe is buying his “27th yacht”.

What are you basing your nonsense off of?

I literally did 1 min of googling to find info that proves you are talking out of your ass and posted it.

Not sure if you were intending to reply to me?

What!? Banks gave out loans so people could rebuild? Even after the lend lease program?

Countries must have been devastated and then had to swear fealty to America as a result.

Checks note

Number of countries that have to do what the U.S. tells them: zero.

Let me do the most basic of research…

From Wikipedia:

"The U.S. rebuilt Europe after WWII primarily through the

Marshall Plan (European Recovery Program, 1948–1951), providing over $13 billion (approx. $150+ billion in 2017 dollars) in aid to 16 Western European nations. The assistance was mostly grants (~90%), not loans, designed to rebuild infrastructure, boost industrial production, and curb communist influence."

I guess your fantasy is just that, a fantasy.

The only pull the U.S. has is the that the plutocrats in their own countries stand to make money too.

Global trade is mutually beneficial and isn’t “scooping up”, in any sense of the phrase, and is in no way taking advantage of people unless the terms were terrible for one of the parties, which none of them were.

The military presence across the work was a result of the cold war. And the European powers we.more than happy to let the U.S. foot the bill, for fighting the “red scare”.

The defense contracts are a result of the U.S.'s military industrial complex, that even Eisenhower warned the U.S. against.

Most of what is wrong with the U.S…can be pointed at Capitalism.

You are not wrong to invoke WWII when discussing the U.S. becoming a hedeminy, but they were already a super power. As a nation, no one was producing more than the U.S.

After WWII, the U.S.'s industrial base was virtually untouched and had no real competition. (Mao and Stalin were great at getting into power and destroying any political opposition, but they were fucking retarded when it came to running a country.)

The U.S. however became the main producer of the world and so wealth was just flowing in.

But without proper controls, capitalism just becomes a plutocracy which is evident here.

Any controls that were put into place were slowly eroded and now, with the weaponization of data, it is a lot easier to control an uneducated working class.

But now the U.S. has moved all its industry overseas and the plutocrats, that have been sucking every ounce of wealth they can, out of the economy have neutered its ability to pivot and evolve.

The fascism in the U.S. right now is probably closer to Mussolini’s version than Hitler’s, but it’s still a cultural rot that needs to be purged.

You can’t just point your finger at things you don’t like and say they did this and just shoot from the hip as to why.

You HAVE to understand how these things develop, and see how they are not some evil that manifests in a vacuum.

Just because someone is shit now, doesn’t mean they were always shit.

But also, no one is clean or pure at this point. Everyone has shit in their history, so using that to justify how you feel today is kind of dumb. Just focus on the actions now. There’s plenty to hate on, but use history to learn how these things evolve. And to do that, you actually have to have an accurate (to some extent) idea of went down.

“Scooping everything up” after WWII doesn’t even make sense in any way, to describe how anything happened in the initial years following WWII.

Damn, this is Valmond’s second post I’ve seen today that he just completely talks out of his ass.

His other post got a bunch of upvotes, so I guess it is working for him. :/

I’m sorry, what exactly did they scoop up after WWII?

This comment demonstrate’s a complete ignorance of what actually happened before, during, and after WWII.

I am not trying to defend the U.S. here, but this comment is particularly stupid.

Either you are a total fucking moron, or deliberately espousing false information for a purpose.

This made me wonder what it would actually look like.

It would be so big, would it curve around with the Lagrange point?

Would it be significant enough to see with the naked eye?

Would we see ripples or waves cause by other gravitational forces. Could it be used to detect gravitational waves?

That would be cool. Except the whole, “not seeing the moon anymore” thing.

Can you imagine the energy you would need to keep something like that from drifting off and or bunching up under its own mass?

Exactly.

It’s always an unknown factor at other places. Some of them you feel like you are taking your life in your own hands.

But Buc-ees is always a guaranteed a clean experience.

Judges others

Gets mad when others do the same to them

That’s actually pretty ignorant and judgemental. That statement sounds so MAGA.

Setting aside the U.S.'s current political disposition for the moment.

The U.S. has always been a huge melting pot of different peoples of the world. A lot of those people would stay together, creating little islands of culture all over.

They would celebrate their culture and often celebrate other people’s culture along with them. (I have been told that the U.S. celebrates Cinco De Mayo way more than Mexico ever did.)

A lot of it comes from asserting your own culture identity against this broad mixing pot. Or even asserting it against active suppression. Some of it is evolved tradition over the generations.

Many people value their ancestral roots and like to celebrate it.

Saying America has no history is so ethnocentric.

The U.S. is made up of immigrants from the entire globe. The U.S.'s history shares its history with every other nation of the world.

I love that there are so many different festivals, from different cultures, all the time. Houston is in Texas, but it is a massively diverse city. We named a highway after a Sikh policeman who had been murdered in the line of duty. The city (county maybe) even lets us sell fireworks for Diwali. There are Greek festivals all over. (Yes it has a terribly racist past, and it is considered the human trafficking capital of the U.S., fuck you big oil.)

I have never had someone introduce themselves to me as a <culture>-American. But plenty of people will talk about their ancestral culture if you ask.

I guess if you live in a monoculture, then you may not value that culture identity as strongly as you might when your ancestral culture is just one of a thousand.

Diversity is king. If someone wants to let their cultural freak flag fly, who the hell are you to judge?

But Highlander was awesome.

It won the Academy Award for best movie ever made.

I got this at a friend’s party.

They were having contests like bobbing for apples and who could eat the caramel apple the fastest…, silly but fun games like that.

I won the caramel apple eating contest, but right afterwards my friend came out of the back room acting like he missed it and wanted an opportunity to win.

So he asked if I would do it again, in a 1v1 with him.

I said yes, of course, but he he gave me a caramel covered onion as a prank.

It was pretty funny. I tore into that sucker and was halfway done chewing the first huge bite before I realized something was wrong.

They said I just stopped “mid-chew” and it looked like my computer froze as my brain took a second to process what was happening.

His wife had been standing by to take a picture and I looked so completely dumbfounded.

They blew it up and put in an 8x10 frame and kept it in their living room for years.

I wish I had asked for a copy. We moved away a long time ago and I doubt they still have it.