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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • Toll roads aren’t bad, it’s all in the details. The problem is that the government is often “captured” and therefore has no incentive to have a fair contract, so they’ll add clauses like

    • If the company loses money because the government does something, the government will pay them. This often prevents the government from reducing or removing the toll road / other privately owned resource.
    • The government can’t “compete” with the toll road, either with another road or (sometimes) through public transport.
    • The government will often, as a form of pork-barrelling, offer people reimbursements for the toll road usage, thereby funneling tax payer money into the private company.
    • Toll roads are tax deductible.

    Ideally, toll roads encourage people to take the train.








  • OK a bit of a rant from me but here I go:

    Tim could easily see a smaller cut from Valve for a big game and say “yeah that’s great sign me up” but he doesn’t. He literally says “You should support the smaller players rather than the large ones”. He’s arguing to give a better rate to struggling developers rather than the successful ones. That’s what the COO says “umadbro” to. Honestly, that’s enough for me to really reconsider buying new games from Steam.

    The issue is: This is exactly how Sweeney talks to people on Twitter. There was a particularly good reply to him once, which basically went: I agree with you and support your principled stance, but I can’t trust you because you are such a troll.

    This is the problem. I truly believe Sweeney is a good person, and he actually wants more open markets not just for Epic but for everyone. Yes, he ships Unreal which smaller devs use and a sale for them means a sale for him, but really you don’t lean into things like this unless you actually want to democratise making games as a principled stance.

    But he can just be such a jerk that people just don’t like talking to him or dealing with him or his companies. It’s frustrating to be honest, because he can be such a voice for good.