Amazing, thanks

Wow amazing, I’m going to give the steam one a go and go from there!

I’ve admittedly not looked much into games on Linux as it wasn’t my priority. I mostly played via steam on windows. What’s the equivalent route on Linux? Is steam available?

It’s possible, but usually harder because what makes the uber wealthy uber wealthy is that they own assets rather than have huge income.

So when they say Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Bezos or whoever has “X” billions, they’re talking about the value of assets they own (usually large stakes in successful companies) which has more of a parallel with how the middle class talk about their house (an asset) now being worth (whatever). It’s not liquid cash.

Taxes on assets are typically realised when those assets are sold or transferred because their value goes up and down and all over the place. And the uber wealthy do pay tax whenever they sell stock because they’re buying this mansion or that yacht. It’s just usually comparatively small to their full fortune which remains in stock.

So the difficult thing about taxing stock while it’s owned is, like I said, the value goes up and down quite dramatically at times. Should the government collect taxes on the buoyant times but then refund them during market downturns? That would be a nightmare. No government wants to be on the hook for refunds during a downturn.

And it can’t (I don’t think) just collect taxes when super valuable stocks are on the way up because that’s not actually cash. It’s just the market value if that stock were to be sold. So the most a government could do would be either to receive some of the stock as a tax payment (not much use to a government that wants to spend it) or force the owners of companies to sell stock and make a cash payment just because they’re successful.

Which sounds fine on the surface, but this messes up how ownership of companies works. Let’s say some good guy CEO (they do exist) has managed the growth of a multi billion business and to do so has brought in investors which now own 49% of the company, and he - the founder - owns 51%. If the company’s value on the market rose 20% you’d get news articles about how the founder now has “XX billion” since last year and that they “earn” so many hundreds of thousands a day compared to your average working class person. If the government forced the owner to part with 3% of their ownership of the company in order to pay this “growth tax” then the founder no longer has overall control of the company. It would be 48% founder owner, 49% investors and 3% whoever the government sell the taxed stock to in order to realise a cash value.

So it erodes ownership. Again I’m sure there are plenty reading this who think “so what?”. But I can tell you that much of the market value of stock, the reason it has the value it does, is in many cases because the market trusts the management of the ownership of the companies to continue to make profit. If you force the erosion of that just because the company did well then you destroy the way the market trusts and ascribes value to things. Which is why the way governments tax company is via profits and stock sales, where the value is already realised or where the decision to sell is not forced in the same way.

So what to do about this?

Well you can just increase the taxes on stock sale, or on dividend income. But what happens there is you snare the wealthy middle class with the same rope you were aiming at the uber wealthy. Again some might not think that a bad thing, but it’s unlikely to be as effective as people would like it to be. You’d generally be raising dividend tax by a percentage point or two on people receiving low six figure sums. Which would get some extra from the Elon Musks, but also would get the same amount from, say, a consultant surgeon, or a recent tech startup founder etc. My point being, there are not huge numbers of these people, compared to the rest of the population that government spending is spread over. The amount you end up raising is not huge compared to what seemed to be on offer when you look at Meta’s total net worth or something like that.

The ultimate answer is about ownership. But it has to be organic (personal opinion) so that it doesn’t cause disruption to the markets that end up hurting the most vulnerable (via job losses).

And the best way this is done is to simply suck it up and pay a little more for a non mega corp solution to something. Want Bezos to have less of the pie? Stop buying through Amazon just because it’s cheaper. Want Gates fortune to be more wide spread? Save yourself a ton of cash by using Linux instead of windows + office licences. Don’t like Elon musk? Stop using twitter, don’t buy a Tesla.

If you’ve done all these things I personally think it’s as much as you can do. You should put your efforts into making these boycots as easy for others to follow as possible (support your favourite FOSS project) etc. Pay for the online services you like so they don’t feel the need to resort to Google ads and on. Unfortunately in a free market such as the ones many of us live in (thinking Western world) the uber wealthy are mainly that because of the millions and millions of micro choices by consumers who are free to go elsewhere but just often don’t choose to.

Corridor Crew is also an excellent YouTube channel for industry professionals commenting on how effects are done

I was a pretty casual windows user, like just going along with its slow crapification because that was the path of least resistance. At work though via AWS I was exposed to various Linux desktop experiences and it was surprisingly fine. Then one day I was trying to do some mundane disk admin task that in Windows XP would have been fairly straight forward to root around in the control panel and find what to do. Searched in the windows 11 start bar for ‘disk management’ (or something similar, whatever it was it was exactly the name of the admin component). Did it find it? Did it heck. Instead it popped up bing (fucking bing??) web results complete with ads. Absolutely zero results for anything on the actual computer or remotely useful. I snapped. It’s done. Windows is crap and dead to me. Put Debian (personal preference) on my main boot drive, kept my windows disk just for the games I think will play better on it. That’s it, it’s over. Microsoft finally fucked it up and will have zero view of me except “this guy seems to play games periodically”. Adios you bloated pile of useless crap. You pour shame on our good memories of XP…

Me: doing a once in forever disk task, types Disk Management in start menu search

Windows: opens link in Bing searching for “Disk Management”, brings up results in browser including ads

Me: what the actual fuck

The UK should absolutely give back cultural artifacts it took from around the world, but everything else you said is silly.

I have no idea either

Lots of Americans here in London, UK. They’ve generally been transferred by their company though. I expect it’s v hard to get in when applying for a new job.

Your original question reads like it’s limited to this thread, not games you’ve seen recommended anywhere and everywhere

Civ II was peak of the series imho… Immersive gameplay trumps graphics

“somehow RIF returned…”

If you’re not adding any value then why don’t engineers send things direct to architects?

C’mon lads, time to solve a murder!

Victoria Taylor :'(

Palestinian border

The what?

Don’t know who you have in mind. But British BBC:

Feb 2022 “How hard will it be to defend Ukraine from Russian invasion?”

December 2023. “Ukraine will… strengthen its defences”

April 2024 - “Ukraine has been defending itself against Russia’s full-scale invasion for two years”

:)

For me getting an alarm clock made a difference. Because that nullified my brains weak excuse that I needed my phone by my bed “for an alarm”. No I didn’t. People have woken up perfectly reliably for years before smartphones. So I got an alarm clock. And that made it easier to turn going to bed into calm reading time instead of doom scrolling (by leaving my phone charging in other room). And that’s made a big difference, not only to quality of reading but also general mood.