Having lower prices for poorer regions isn’t price fixing. The real issue is that it’s hard as fuck to find a way to have localized pricing when every bordering country, richer or poorer, uses the same currency.
Localised pricing is good though? Is it really fair ask someone in India to pay the same price as an American? If you can’t geo block keys, you can’t stop people taking advantage by using a VPN to buy games from whatever country got the lowest price. The result will just be publishers keeping the high price for every country, screwing poorer regions over.
Did you read the article? This isn’t comparable to your India vs America example, it’s specific to prices only within the EU where the EU has digital market rules that specifically prohibit this.
What Valve did does sound like price-fixing too according to your linked definition of “an agreement among competitors to [fix] price levels”:
“Valve and five publishers (Bandai Namco, Capcom, Focus Home, Koch Media and ZeniMax) agreed to use geo-blocking so that activation keys sold in some countries … would not work in other member states. That would prevent someone … buying a cheaper key … where prices are lower.”
Yes I did read it. I was pointing out that all this will do is screw over citizens of poorer EU countries. India vs USA was simply to make it obvious why the concept of geo blocking makes sense. Germans will on average have stronger buying power than someone in Latvia.
Steam is a storefront, not a competitor to game publisher. It’s effectively no different than Lidl agreeing to run a regional rebate program for Samsung TVs in Latvia for whatever reason.
The geo blocking enabled cheaper prices for certain countries, not higher. The only people who would have an issue with it is people from richer countries that for some reason are jealous of lower prices in some countries.
I’ll admit I may not understand economies well, but the inverse is that these publishers are enabled to charge higher prices in higher-income countries. The cost of creating their goods is constant, so if Valve isn’t selling at a loss to poorer regions then they are simply extracting additional profit from higher-income regions on the assumption that those customers can afford it.
I wonder how this kind of scenario plays out in other industries. Regardless, it seems like the EU has a goal of reducing gaps in buying power between their members, and their unified digital market is a step in that direction.
Congratulations, you have finally find out how corporations fuck with customers to juice them as much as legally possible of money for their executives and shareholders.
I think applying traditional economics to this situation is wrong. Games are digital goods so beyond translation and maybe some regional censorship, there isn’t much additional cost to sell at a discounted price in lower income countries. If anything, being able to sell the same product in lower countries would lower the cost in higher income countries.
if Valve isn’t selling at a loss to poorer regions then they are simply extracting additional profit from higher-income regions on the assumption that those customers can afford it.
Valve can’t sell for a loss the same way ebay can’t. Valve simply takes a percentage of the price everytime a game is bought, publishers are in complete control of the price they want to sell. Often, publishers will let Steam automatically set regional pricing based e.g. the American price though.
The way these publishers operate, they will simply set the price at the highest possible value to extract as much as money ad they can from those willing to spend 60+$. Those unwilling or incapable of spending that amount of money, will just buy the game later on a sale. Price skimming has only become more and more prevalent in PC gaming with steam being the “innovator” of frequent sales.
We have more energy consuming stuff than ever. But do you ever see NEW substations being built? NEW long range power lines? I don’t.
Around here, the utility has a deal- they will sell you a top of the line $400 color touchscreen WiFi thermostat that talks to Alexa and displays the weather report and does a bunch of other shit, for $10 (not a typo). In exchange, you let them remotely shut off your AC if the grid gets overloaded.
Why do they do this? Because a few truckloads of thermostats (with a bulk discount) are a fuckton cheaper than actually upgrading the grid.
And so we hear about grid overload days and possible brownouts and incentives to shut stuff off as if this is the way it’s supposed to be. But the reality is these problems only exist because utilities don’t keep ahead of necessary upgrades. After all, why spend the money when there’s shareholders to answer to?
This is not a remotely accurate assessment of demand side management programs. Such programs are overwhelmingly required of IOUs by states since they tend to be cheaper than infrastructure upgrades for everyone. Utilities on the other hand tend to prefer infrastructure upgrades because they get a guaranteed rate of return typically. You have this completely backwards.
Interesting. Do you have any sources on this or more reading material behind it? I have yet to really see any things suggesting utilities are asking to do CapEx on infrastructure improvements but are being told no.
I think I gave off the wrong impression that these are more linked than they are, sorry. Many states require cost effective EE because it’s generally good policy (benefits outweigh costs), and some of those benefits include not having to build new capacity. PUCs generally also support infrastructure investments, and with guaranteed rates of return on most T&D for example, it’s a no brainer. So states are often doing both, and there are varying options about the merits of each. To your question though, one notable recent example is the gas pipeline that Gov Cuomo vetoed, which led to more gas efficiency programs in downstate NY.
I’m also embarrassed to report I can’t think of a good source for you since I’m in the industry, other than primary sources like utility financial statements, rate cases, state regulations, etc. Hope this was helpful - it’s a fascinating industry.
You’re a pizza delivery person, and you know there are some routes you can take to save you more than 20 min for some deliveries, but you’re going the wrong way in one way roads.
One day you get caught, and you get fined 20 cents. You make an extra 5 bucks per delivery. Will you stop going the wrong way to save you 20 min each time you have to do those deliveries?
Well, this is the fundamental problem with fines. They are stupidly, gargantually disproportionate to what they’re trying to achieve.
Which means that companies make more money paying the fine whenever they get caught, than just not doing whatever illegal thing they’re doing.
Yeah, fines need to be calculated on an exponential scale based on the income and value of the target. The richer they are, the more painful the penalty. One wrong move and the billionaire is reduced to a meth addicted hobo living under a bridge.
Valve won’t break the law for other publisher’s profits. Steam is just a store front, they were geo blocking on behalf of other publishers.
Valve also doesn’t take a cut from steam key sales not bought directly through their storefront, so the geoblocking keys isn’t something that will impact them. More likely, this will result in citizens of poorer EU countries getting screwed over by having to pay higher prices for games, since they can’t stop EU citizens from taking advantage of buying the game from the poorest EU country.
Yes, this will just mean that game publishers will set one price for the whole EU which will be based on the income in the richest countries. They can still geoblock countries outside of the EU, just not within it.
Progress isn’t linear and it sure as hell doesn’t come when we say the problem isn’t worth even addressing because our current tools aren’t big enough for its scale.
34 years old, I’ve been without power a cumulative of maybe 3 days total my entire life. That includes being hit by many hurricanes including Michael which was a CAT5. You might be exaggerating a bit.
I vaguely remember a TV movie from like… 2006 where some kind of solar storm /coronal mass ejection thing happens right as some hacker was trying to “HEY EVERYONE THIS SYSTEM IS VULNERABLE AND YOU SHOULD DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT BEFORE A BAD GUY TAKES CONTROL” type hack of the electrical grid, and the combination of the hack and solar radiation causing most of the US power grid to shut down
I haven’t seen anything in real life to convince me the power gris isn’t a prince ruperts drop that only works because it’s never been shut down all at once before, and once it does that tail shatters and takes the rest with it.
In fact, living near a power substation that supplies a couple major things for a nearby city, I’m convinced the only reason there hasn’t been a massive attack against it is because people just assume it’s well protected.
The orientation of my house sucks and our neighborhood has many old growth trees. I wish I could be that asshole, but after running the numbers I don’t even break even over the expected lifespan of the panels. :(
Tiny lot + aforementioned old growth trees means that’s also not viable. :( My “best” option (which I have) is a nat gas backup generator for when the grid goes down. It’s expensive, and very much NOT a clean energy source, but it’s what I have to work with. I work 100% from home and need full-time power.
I would love to get it, but I am getting hounded two or three times a weekend by door-to-door solar salespeople.
It’s always the same shit routine they pull about saying they are just passing the word about some change the power company just did or something. They supposedly just want to give a “consultation” about what that means and they are not trying to sell me anything.
If their blatant trespassing didn’t already piss me off, their bullshit faux consultation pitch absolutely does.
The end result? I really don’t want anything to do with any solar company, at all. It’s a shame, TBH. I really don’t want to start shopping for solar in full defense mode like I am about to buy a used car. The sales people in that industry have absolutely fucked it for me.
That reminds me. I have a three part Ring recording of one of those people going into mental meltdown saying that offering me a quote and consultation was not solicitation. It’s hysterical.
Honestly, that is something that really interests me. If there is anything that I am holding out for, it’s solid state lithium batteries. (A significant battery bank is high on my list of requirements and having garage full of current generation li-ion batteries still makes me cringe a little.) Prices should be much better once they go into mass production for EVs. Hopefully.
Lots of great content there! If you are remotely a DIYer and have the means, do a lot of the solar install yourself and hire pros to ensure you’re safe/ connect to grid if needed.
Buying used panels and mounting them yourself can be very cost effective, you would only need to hire an electrician. Of course be aware of local code regarding such things. I understand that the time commitment isn’t an option for some people.
Yeah, but I mean aren’t they the price of a small used car? My bill averages $100 a month, except in winter when it doubles. That’s a looong time for it to pay itself off.
We’ve only had a few truly catastrophic wildfires and only 23,000 homes burned down since 2017, let’s wait until those numbers come up before we start wasting money on things like “replacing 100 year old infrastructure that was built to last 70.” If we replaced every little thing, how would we pay the executives and shareholders?
Don’t worry, they will repopulate the earth with their billionaire genius genes once we all die and they return on their rockets and emerge from their sweet underground bunkers.
Anyone have any suggestions for a relatively inexpensive smart watch that can be used with GadgetBridge? I don’t need many features besides push notifications, maybe an alarm etc.
I use an Amazfit GTR 2e, and it works almost perfectly with gadgetbridge. The only difficulty I have is i’m unable to manually update A-GPS data, so getting a GPS lock can take a while. But I don’t use it a lot, and honestly, the Fitbit Versa I came from wasn’t all that much better.
PineTime checks these boxes for under $30. The caveat being that it’s an open source project without fancy features. Also, the heart rate monitor doesn’t work well on my skin, but it works for some people.
I love my PineTime, but I stopped using it because I wanted sleep tracking.
“Only” 13 days of battery plus no eink display. It might be good but it’s still no pebble. This is more akin to an amazfit bip or any of those existing cheap smart watches
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