Helps them feel better than others, maybe they have low self esteem or something

:( First you’re there, and then you’re not.

Night Palace by Mount Eerie for me

Maybe seconded by The New Sound by Geordie Greep

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I watched all of Twin Peaks because I was interested in the hype around David Lynch and wanted to see his most recent work.

This episode made it all worth it.

I think you might misunderstand me. I’m not saying that the only way to attain power is through wealth. Im pushing back against your idea that since an individuals wealth isn’t cash, it’s not worth accounting for. It may stop making sense to count, but only in the sense that it literally becomes incomprehensible to, and at that point it is long overdue to say it is too much. The vast power those people have is due to their net worth. Because someone else has vast power without the wealth doesn’t contradict that fact.

Also I don’t really see why you’re tying up your freedom with billionaires, as if it is a binary choice between billionaires and personal freedom or no billionaires and tyranny. That’s a bit of a strange equivalency you draw. In any case, and in practical terms, you* probably don’t even have the freedom to be in the presence of the wealthiest of wealthy, let alone fart in front of them.

*assuming you are not ultra wealthy or somehow related personally to a member of the ultra rich

Edit: in other words, billionaires don’t grant you your freedom – and their freedom to extract capital and accumulate vast amounts of wealth probably has little bearing on your right to your house or personal property. In fact, they are far more equipped to seize things like your land, your data, your means of subsistence, than you are to defend them.

Untill I grew up and realised it’s not money they’ve got, it’s estimated net worth. It’s hard to turn that into cash.

I used to think that, too. But just because its not cash doesn’t mean it doesn’t still translate to wealth or power. They essentially park their money in investments, liquidate when they need to, but otherwise use their assets to extract further wealth exert further influence.

I like the finals too. It’s the best arcade shooter I’ve played since halo. It’s just dumb fun.

Ive been hooked on deadlock recently

This is the only hot take in this whole thread lol

My lukewarm take is that Star Wars has varied so greatly in quality from product-to-product, that any take that categorizes some of it as bad and some of it as good is a lukewarm, standard take.

I listen to NPR often and I enjoy it, but it ultimately has the same problem as other mainstream outlets in that they are beholden to advertisers and, in turn, to extractors of capital. It leans left socially, but as with almost all other major news organizations, it is self-interested and will almost always support neocolonialist US practices. One tiny, not-the-best but temporally relevant example – they have yet to call what’s happening in Gaza genocide.

As someone else mentioned, there is Democracy Now!, they are viewer funded, but that is also supplemented by groups such as the Ford Foundation, which obviously has ties to capital as well. Still, Democracy Now! will give more of an “outside looking in” view of the United States.

I like listening to both NPR and Democracy Now! to hear both the US-centric (capitalist) points vs the a more global (and anti-capitalist) viewpoint.

If people can’t handle the word shit, they probably shouldn’t be looking at shit on Lemmy. Lmao

Appreciate you actually inputting your view.You’re right in that I was mixing colloquial terms with technical ones, and thus my statements were wrong, or at least misleading. A market is not a resource, but a marketplace can be a factor of production, the owner of which is paid a rent.

When I referred to the online marketplace of Steam as a resource, I was comparing Steam to a marketplace, like a business complex, which is a capital good and a factor of production for businesses operating out of the business complex. Those businesses operating out of the complex pay a rent to the owner of that business complex. We don’t see traditional production in the games industry, wherein if you as a business have produced X amount of output, you have also created X amount of income. With cars or grain or tangible products, when you turn inputs into outputs, you own the value of the outputs. That’s not true for a videogame, whose value comes from the sale. In that sense, Steam is a factor of production in that value-creation process – it is an input – and as such, game devs pay a rent to Valve for that.

I’m not saying there are no operational costs for Steam. All I’m saying is they charge a form of rent to the creators of videogames. That rent may encapsulate other benefits, like being put on the front of the Steam store (marketing), analytics, tools for devs to interact with customers, etc. But it is still rent, since it comes in my opinion before the value is created.

I mean, there is a reason the individual in the article, and Valve’s own former resident economist Yanis Varoufakis refer to Steam as a digital fiefdom. It is a digital equivalent of peasants paying a rent to work on an owner’s land. In this case, Steam as a factor of production is not land, but capital.

Then again, I’m not an economist. Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.

Thank you. I don’t think I’m being stupid, but you have made me think about it a lot, so I appreciate that. You are right that the online marketplace is not a fixed resource, that’s not technically right at all. I was thinking for a long time, “did I misunderstand that?” I certainly didn’t think about the input vs output aspect of production. This led me to do some more reading and here’s what I’ve got.

I do still think Steam is factor of production in that it is a capital good, like a business complex. The problem with your outputs argument, I think, is outputs are the quantity and quality of goods or services produced in a given time period. Well, for the devs, there really isn’t an output in the traditional productive sense. They didn’t produce a bunch of cars, creating X amount of value through their labor. The value is only created when copies are sold, and in that sense Steam, and other game stores are inputs in the value created by a game dev. I think one could even make an argument that publishers provide a service and Steam is involved in that as a factor of production, but I think that speaks more to the strangeness of the software market in general. Anyways thanks for actually taking the time, I got to learn some cool stuff and feel a little humbled in the process so that is good

I don’t think they do, but if so I’m happily ready to admit I’m wrong. How do you find my interpretation wrong?

Lmao you’re the one misunderstanding rents here, you don’t need to try to spin it around on me. If you think you’re right, go ahead and tell me where I’m wrong based on that definition.

In neoclassical economics, economic rent is any payment (in the context of a market transaction) to the owner of a factor of production or resource, supply of which is fixed.[1] In classical economics, economic rent is any payment made (including imputed value) or benefit received for non-produced inputs such as location (land) and for assets formed by creating official privilege over natural opportunities (e.g., patents). In the moral economy of neoclassical economics, economic rent includes income gained by labor or state beneficiaries of other “contrived” (assuming the market is natural, and does not come about by state and social contrivance) exclusivity, such as labor guilds and unofficial corruption.

Edit: In case anyone needs this broken down: Online videogame marketplaces are a resource. The supply of online videogame marketplaces is fixed. Valve is the owner of the largest online videogame marketplace, Steam. The publisher of a videogame pays Valve to list their game on Steam. A payment to the owner of a resource, the supply of which is fixed, is economic rent. Imagine how low you gotta be to downvote Wikipedia.

The cut that Steam takes from publishers is a rent. It is the equivalent of buying property and allowing an individual or family to live in it, for a cut of their wages. The landowner and Steam do not produce anything – they are a place, physical or virtual, for people to operate out of, at a cost. Steam is not a store that sells their own products, they are a platform that sells other people’s stuff and they take a cut. If I own a big plot of land, and let a bunch of businesses operate on that land as long as they pay me monthly, I’m taking a rent. It’s the same thing.

I feel like I don’t even need to comment on your weird bragging about profiting off of war, but I’ll just say this – whether you like it or not, whether you are personally interested or not, you are financially interested in the suffering and death of other people. If you think that’s morally okay, good for you. Personally, I think that’s pretty monstrous. I’d wish you a good day, but after learning that, I hope you get some help.

Sorry dude, you have a right to your opinion – but most of what you just said isn’t true. I understand you think it’s ridiculous, but being against rent extraction is a classically leftist political philosophy. You’re right that it costs money to operate servers, but that doesn’t mean those servers are not the property of Valve. They utilize that property to collect rent from publishers.

That fact is not well liked by leftists. By liberals? Sure, go nuts. But I think you’re in the process of finding yourself in the latter camp, at the moment. I’d definitely encourage you to look up leftists vs liberals because I think you may have a misunderstanding.

Regardless, I agree the hate/vitriol can go overboard coming from these types of people. I agree with the political and philosophical underpinnings of their frustration, but we are all born into a rat race and taught that we should do anything to get out of it, so no one actually thinks about whether things like “passive income” are right or wrong. We are taught that’s what you gotta shoot for, and I’m not going to blame someone for still believing that.

I see what you’re getting at, and I agree to an extent. Steam doesn’t own the whole marketplace, but they do own their whole marketplace, which is the biggest. So I think the issue for leftists that I’m referring to is the rents aspect – profiting off of the value of other people’s work.

You could argue steam adds some value to accessing games in one place, or that they need to be able to maintain their servers in order to maintain efficient distribution for publishers. But in terms of classical economics Steam doesn’t produce a product, I think it’s arguable they provide a service, and I think their capital is mostly a product of their ownership of cloud capital. When a company makes money based mostly on the ownership of an asset, be it land or machinery or computers, that’s where leftists take umbrage. Not liberals or Democrats necessarily, just leftists.

But that all said I still like Steam and Valve overall.

I think there’s a difference between them being a good company for customers and them being a digital fief. Similar to how Amazon could be seen as a “good” company by customers (return policy, cheap stuff, etc), but they essentially own an entire marketplace and decides who sells products, and extracts rents from people who are making good innovative stuff. Steam is the same way.

Of course, Valve doesn’t have the mistreatment of employees Amazon does. They have no internal hierarchy, which is cool and I imagine means less management involvement. Their president seems to just want to make gamers happy, and thats great too.

Theyre an anomaly in the business world because they’re seemingly a great company that doesn’t follow monetization trends, while still being hugely financially successful. But they still extract rents from videogame makers, so leftists see that as a black eye.