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Like can you pay with crypto at a Stripe POS when the infrastructure goes down? Or was this just completely irrelevant?
I guess what you mean is "OS-provided controls". In that case, ye that is not what this is.
>(root)
GrapheneOS is not rooted.
Point 2: I was thinking that the most heavily armed private citizenry counts as "private security". More guns than people. Also far more private security guards than cops. To me that is exactly what "private security everywhere" looks like.
Point 4: To be honest i think point 3 actually applies to any place anywhere. Someone who knows the local police gets away with far more shit in my small german village. But "doesn't apply to anyone who is white" clearly is a sign of lack of rule of law. Laws should be race-independent and statistics show that in the US it's anything but.
Point 5: No chaperone-level warnings, but the UK, Canada, Germany, Australia, Japan all issue standing travel advisories about US gun violencem, the UK literally tells citizens "try not to walk through quieter areas alone, especially at night." And there were recommendations i got against business travel to the US especially with company issued equipment.
I mean, man, currently the US is not looking good from my point of view. I have a bunch of american friends who say immigration and everything else is ruining Germany. But looking at the stats it's looking quite okay:
Germany vs US: - Murder: 0.91 vs 5.7 per 100k
- Rape: 14 vs 40 per 100k
- Violent crime overall: 253 vs 380 per 100k
- Murder/homicide clearance: ~95% vs 50%
- Private security guard to police ratio: 0.9:1 vs 1.9:1
- Police killings: 10 vs 1100 per year
- Incarceration rate: 67 vs 600 per 100k
The highest incarceration rate in the developed world, ~4% of the world's population, ~25% of its prisoners. Are Americans just incredibly prone to being criminals? No. The crime rates above show the violent crime gap is ~1.5x, not 9x, and property crime is comparable or even lower than Germany's. ~95% of convictions are plea bargains extracted under threat of a "trial penalty", hundreds of thousands sit in jail pre-trial because they can't afford cash bail, and sentences run far longer for the same offenses. The US locks up 9x more people because it chooses to, not because Americans are more criminal. A state that imprisons its own population at Cuba and Rwanda rates while half its murders go unsolved, sells bail to the highest bidder, and runs on guilty pleas instead of trials. I would not correct anyone if they told me the US was not governed by the rule of law.
Steam's official price parity policy applies only to Steam Keys, which are free to generate and cost Valve nothing. The actual written rule, from the Steamworks documentation, says: "It is important that you don't give Steam customers a worse deal than Steam Key purchasers." It even allows discounts at different times on other stores, as long as Steam gets a comparable offer within a reasonable period. There is no written policy preventing a developer from selling a separate, non-Steam-key version of their game cheaper elsewhere. The claim that Valve informally enforces broader price parity beyond Steam Keys is the unproven allegation at the center of the lawsuit.
And the broader claim, that lower commissions would lead to cheaper games for consumers, has already been tested and disproven. Epic exclusives like Borderlands 3, Control, Metro Exodus, Phoenix Point, and The Division 2 launched with no Steam version at all, complete pricing freedom, and a 12% commission. They were all priced at full retail. The hypothetical £35 game you describe has been possible for almost a decade. Nobody has produced it because developers and publishers set prices, and they choose to maximize their own margin regardless of what the platform takes.
> We will give you free matchmaking - just not for players who have bought on another platform, so if players buy on another platform they can't play with their friends.
Steamworks matchmaking requires a Steam account and Steam does not force developers to use Steamworks. This is how every platform-specific networking layer works: Xbox Live requires an Xbox account, PlayStation Network requires a PSN account. They offer a free matchmaking service if you want other platforms use other platforms. But i guess it is because of:
> Everything else is an attempt to stay the primary shopfront.
Yeah this sounds a lot like:"How dare they deliver a better service in the pursuit of user retention."
> taking payments, serving games, having refunds(!) and adding a chat panel isn't big and complicated in 2026
This lists surface features and ignores the infrastructure: global CDN serving petabytes of downloads, payment processing across dozens of regional payment methods, fraud prevention, Workshop mod hosting, cloud saves, anti-cheat, regional pricing tooling, Proton development, Steam Deck compatibility, discovery algorithms. But the real test is simpler: developers are not forced to use Steam. If the value were as thin as claimed, the lower-priced competitors would be winning. They are not.
2) is weak. The 30% rate was set in 2003 when Steam had zero market power and was identical to the rate used by Apple, PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo. Valve later added tiered reductions (25% above $10M, 20% above $50M), bringing the effective average to ~24%. The rate moved downward while the platform added massive infrastructure: free multiplayer matchmaking, cloud saves, Workshop, Proton, anti-cheat, global CDN, refunds, and community tools. The 30% buys far more today than it did two decades ago.
Developers can also generate unlimited(or i think now limited to some ratio of steam sales) Steam keys and sell them anywhere else with Valve taking 0% commission. If valve were extracting monopoly rents, this escape route would not exist.
The actual lawsuit targets the PMFN price parity clause not the commission itself. And on PC, which is an open platform where Epic's 12% store gained roughly 3% share in seven years despite hundreds of millions in investment, the monopoly framing falls apart. That 12% is also based on EPIC using lots of anti-competitor and anti-consumers tactics and using Fortnite money to prop up the store.
"Some" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Subscriptions are structurally designed to extract payment for non-use. the whole point of the model is to be predatory.
You pre-pay for some allotment of resources but get nothing back for unused resources. And the main profit comes from the gap between what you paid for and the actual usage. And that's just in the best case scenario there the company is not running at a loss just to squeeze you later even harder. The entire model only works if people throw their money into the void.
If a provider genuinely wanted to cover the costs my usage imposes on them, they would bill me for usage. That's the honest version: you used X, here's the bill for X. Instead, subscriptions deliberately decouple what I pay from what I consume, and they always decouple it in the vendor's favor, never mine. I never (well i think Kagi[0] actually is different, one outlier) get a refund for the month I didn't watch anything or the API calls I didn't make.
[0]: https://getlago.substack.com/p/why-kagi-launched-no-use-no-p...
*should clarify, Node.js, PHP, and Haskell did ship patches. Python, Ruby, Erlang, and Go opted for documentation updates; Java went "won't fix."