I went down this rabbit hole about a year ago, and didn’t have much luck. In the end, the best results I was able to get were from Steam’s Big Picture Mode on a Windows device, mostly launching Firefox (might have been Chrome?) with different launch arguments to immitate a smart TV.

Most available software either doesn’t support Linux well, doesn’t support streaming services and outside software, or doesn’t support non-kb&m input methods. You can get two, but never all three. You could try SteamOS, now that its out, but unfortunately my hopes wouldn’t be high for it to have all the apps you needs functioning.

I think I’d keep a lot of the core stuff, esspecially at lower levels, but at mid levels, I’d try and put a lot less emphasis on academic work, and more on practical implementation of those skills. For example, in place of a study of shakesphere, I might put a lesson on how ads are written. The point would still be to encourage better media literacy, but ads are something we see constantly in the modern world, and require an emphasis on critical thinking most literature analysis ignores. Another example might be a reduction in the amount of math classes, but requiring a skill that uses math practically, such as woodworking or 3D modeling, to try and practice logic and problem solving off-the-page.

Ideally, this would help cover a lot more real-world skills, and give students a chance to try a broader range of fields earlier, as well and encouraging a deeper and more applicable understanding of the underlying skills meant to be taught.

The only potential reason I can see is that it could be strategicly useful as climate change makes the weather there more mild. Given that this is Trump, however, and Denmark (and thus Greenland) is currently an ally, it would make more sense that he read it Twitter or something and he repeated it.

Trump said he’d take control of Panama and Greenland potentially including a military invasion, and said he’d buy Canada.

Thats the short, out-of-the-loop, reason you’re hearing about it.

AI content is low-quality slop. That said, sometimes low-quality slop is the best option for what you want, and in that case, it can make sense to use. That slop can also make a useful ingredient for other, better works, so long as its just a small peice used appropriately.

I don’t, but I also don’t have autocorrect on. I’ve just given up on trying to remember.

If you want another CS level, Italy Inferno has a ton of photogentic spots in both Source and GO. I’m also particularly fond of Lake, but that might be partly the 500 hours of Wingman on the map speaking.

Edit: or for Valve games in general, theres the dam from Half Life, Ravenholm or the drained shores from Half-Life 2, or an overgrown chamber from Portal 2.

In my case, its even just if packet loss gets too high - not rare on wifi.

Shallots

But why not just have the people who can pay reparations, can punish those running illegal casinos, and can do it without catching others in the crossfire do it?

c/nostupidquestions might be a better spot to post this. asklemmy is more for silly open-end questions, or more poll-like questions rather than questions that expect a genuine, well research answer.

A) Valve should not stop casinos from profiting off vulnerable people, because they have already made money off those people and it would somehow be unfair to stop now, which to me sounds ridiculous.

My argument isn’t that Valve shouldn’t ban them if they have the means. Its that Valve cannot effectively ban them without penalising unrelated users just as much or more. The body that does have the means to do so without putting random users in the crossfire is the government.

You are using this as an argumentation that the government should ban them instead of Valve, but the end tesult would be the same. The casinos would walk away with the money, and the victims would be left to cry over it.

In a lot of these cases, even under current law, the government could be fining the individuals running these casinos. As they are run with effectively no oversight, many are blatently rigged, rely on false advertising, or use shoddy, under-the-table finances. That was what the first big crackdown was over - not the existance of these casinos, but the revelation of how rigged they were. As exemplified by the mob tactics being used by these casinos, they haven’t changed. Depending on the location, laws could also be implemented in ways that do go into effect in more aggressive ways, upto and including fining casinos for past actions if its really needed (and to be clear, I wouldn’t be opposed to fines like this being applied against Valve either.)

B) Poor Valve could not compete with their competition if they didn’t have the money they are gaining from their gambling-adjacent market, which to me sounds even more ridiculous. When Epic attempted to pry open the market using one of the biggest and most successful games ever as a leverage, they largely failed because the Steam user base was too entrenched. Steam is literally printing money right now and they don’t need the CS skin money to compete with anyone.

When talking about CS, we’re talking about an individual product, and one that is competing with other products where lootboxes and other manipulative tactics are already the norm. As you said, this isn’t about Steam. Valve is still a buisness, and their products are still a part of the market. They’re not going to just spend money to run a game they lose money on. Even if they do stop selling lootboxes, that doesn’t fix much because you’ve got thousands of other companies also trying to hook the same addicts on their gambling products. Instead, you need to impose limitations industry-wide, to ensure one product can’t get ahead by just being more abusive. Since we obviously aren’t going to have Valve, EA, Ubisoft, Epic, ect. all come together and agree to stop putting gambling in their games, we need a higher power to do so, that being the government.

You can’t do anything about the money the casinos have already made, but you can stop them by making further money.

Valve makes literally billions and can invest to their heart’s content. They are not a small indie dev.

So if I understand this right, and I don’t think I am, you’re arguing that valve should just disable the entire CS skin trading and marketing system, current victims and other users be damned, and should stop expecting to make money on their products because they have enough money as it is? That sounds like a ridiculous argument, so please clairify what I’m misunderstanding here.

Edit: fixed typos, and changed phrasing to sound less combative

It’s not his place to provide a solution: he is a journalist exposing a problem. Do you have such expectations for all journalists talking about any topic?

It wouldn’t be his place to provide a solution if he was arguing that the practice is a problem and prehaps pushing for further study. It is his place because throughout the video, he tries to argue that solving the problem is not only possible, but easy - and yet, despite supposedly being easy, his best solution is to basically propose that the industry self-regulate. That is the main issue I have with this video.

Valve could shut down the entire gambling market today and nothing would change to their market position.

And how would they do this without screwing over normal users and victums of the casinos in the process? They can’t get money from these casinos, nor collect casino records to redistribute scammed money. All they can do is disable trading or their marketplace, effectively seizing the poker chips (or metals balls, following Coffee’s pachinko comparison) but doing nothing about the money casinos have taken from victims nor preventing the casinos from either walking away or re-investing in a new casino. To prevent new ones from popping up, you could disable all trading and marketing, but now you’re punishing 132 million users for the acts of a couple thousand.

They could have some sort of account-level check to make sure that minors don’t spend their steam gift cards on CS skins

They could, but A) this is just one game on their platform, and B) this would leave them directly competiting against those who don’t regulate themselves and can make and reinvest significantly more. This is exactly the situation that Coffee argued was systematic and needed to be adressed further up the chain previously.

they’d rather use the gambling loophole of “akshually, it’s not gambling as defined by law”. Then they lie through their teeth by saying that they “don’t have any data” supporting the claim that the gambling aspect of the game has profited them by leading to more interest in their games, which is bullshit.

Again, exactly like their competition. The recent talk of Balatro’s PEGI rating being a prime example, with the industry self-regulation body declaring that virtual slot machines and loot boxes aren’t gambling but featuring poker hands was.

PC players, and Lemmy users in particular, have a huge double standard for Valve.

This is the problem I have with this video. Valve is being held to a different standard, and told to self-regulate while others in this very series are having blame redirected away from them because its unreasonable to expect them to self-regulate.

Honestly, in a lot of ways, I think this video is a miss. In both this video and to a lesser extent the last, he put a lot of the blame on Valve, but also provides a higher standard to Valve than the other companies covered. So much of this video boils down to “Valve uses lootboxes too,” and “Valve needs to do something about this.” without addressing Valve’s position as a market player nor providing any solution for Valve to actually tackle the casino problem. He even says in the video that Valve previously issued takedowns but nothing changed and many of the casinos didn’t even respond to the cease and desist. No other course of action is suggested, and frankly, I don’t see any from Valve that wouldn’t punish victums and unrelated users far more than the casinos.

This isn’t to say Valve is blameless, but Valve is fairly tame for their direct involvement with lootboxes and is competiting directly against companies that use them far more agressively - exactly the reason Coffee previously gave the casinos and those involved with them leniency, and encouraged looking further up the chain. In the same way, I’d say the actual solution here would be for governments to ban underage gambling and enforce those laws - because the more Valve trys to crack down on this or even just avoid it, the more of an advantage the worse players in the space have. Ubisoft and EA have already been attempting to dislodge Steam for years, and its not because they think they can be more moral than Steam.

Or sort phrase. The sort of thing you might introduce a minor character in a book with. Something that would fit in a phrase like, “He was a tall, buff man.”

I’m not really sure whether to be proud or ashamed - esspecially considering my title card indicates all my stats have decreased.

It isn’t absolute, but its rare for a politician not to be corrupt in some way. Generally to get into power, you have to be willing to put yourself above others or abuse the system. Then, once you’re in power, most systems encourage corruption, or even make it hard to avoid. Generally the more powerful the position, the worse it is. That said, just as you should never underestimate the amount of evil in the world, you shouldn’t underestimate the amount of good. Even if the system is stacked against them, some good people do manage to get through and genuinely do good things for their people.

Personally, I’m not too opposed to one-way federation, at least for the moment. They’re not a large platform, nor particularly competitve with the more open Fediverse (for the moment). The lack of attribution on the other hand, is iffy, both in terms of giving OC creators proper attribution for their work, and in terms of reducing misinformation (IE showing .ml posts as standard news posts).

All that said, I don’t think its a large enough issue to be concerned about for now. Give it like 3-6 months and see if things have changed (or if the problem has disappeared). This isn’t like Threads where we have to worry about a billion dollar Embrace Extend Extinguish campaign. Who knows, if we’re esspecially lucky, the site might grow into a better Fediverse alternative to Lemmy, or will grow and die in a way that sends positive users our way - something that would greatly benifit the Fediverse in it’s current state.

The vast majority of those machines are very rigged, with a configurable winrate. I’m guessing that machine was set to just never pay out the large prize.