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.
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.
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.
I’m at this point pretty convinced that the US is like your friend in high school that never changed the oil in his car because it still started and ran, until of course it didn’t.
Nationalise utilities. But the GOP would just attack them when they are in power. Fucken hate the clown show. Maintenance is bad all over this fucking country cause everyone gets so butthurt they can’t pinch those pennies into their own accounts. Its fucken maddening I hope the whole bitch falls apart just so I can rub the ashes in their faces.
I mean the majority of black holes spin… It’s kinda fundamental to their existance as most things in the universe have motion and when you super compress those things into a black hole, that motion has to go somewhere.
Not really. But it’s always good to get confirmation of our theories. And it’s usually even more exiting to find an error in a well established theory.
And then you’ve got to consider that at least mathematically a black whole doesn’t have any volume, so what could actually spin in something that’s infinitely small? This more or less confirms that this is bullshit.
If you’re asking that then you first need to ask what the distinction between the two is. and further does it even make sense for one to spin and not the other
Even if there is heterogeneity inside the system, that does not indicate severability or that the whole system is made up of smaller constituent systems.
The black hole and the stuff outside it constitute a single system, and within that system, angular momentum is conserved. So as objects cross the event horizon, their angular momentum is transferred to the black hole.
That would be a general method, if we were close enough to observe the shape of the event horizon (which we aren’t).
The article is describing another way, which only works in this case because the black hole is precessing so extremely that the changing axis of rotation is frame-dragging the polar jets along with it.
I thought nothing actually crossed the event horizon and was essentially frozen approaching a complete stop in time in a kind of 2f representation of 3d reality until it slowly leaked out trillions of years later as hawking radiation?
From an outsider’s perspective, you would see an object approach and then freeze. It would red-shift dimmer until it disappeared. From an in-falling perspective, I don’t think you’d notice anything at all.
Isn’t most everything spinning? Seems like having zero angular momentum would be rare and remarkable. I’m not even sure how exactly to define zero momentum in terms of reference frames.
Can’t wait for Anton on YouTube (Link ) to upload somethin about this.
Man explains things so nicely and so well. Always somethin interesting and it’s less time spent doom scrolling or listening to people yell at each other in comments
I thought we already knew they spun, given the incredible amount of angular momentum in their accretion disks. Seems like a “duh” thing to prove with image data that the physics data already implied.
I thought so as well but the article says the spin doesn’t match the accretion disc, I’m not sure if that’s s significant aspect of the discovery possibly? I’m not well versed in relativity to be honest
Edit: forgive me, someone below said pretty much this
engadget.com
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