• 4 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 19th, 2023

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  • This puts competitive pressure on Microsoft. Valve’s goal is to turn Steam OS into a legitimate competitor to Windows for gamers, and Microsoft should fear Valve’s success.

    Right now, Microsoft has no legitimate competitors in the PC gaming space. They are free to do anything they want to their OS and consumers have no choice but to tolerate it. If Microsoft say “watch these adverts”, consumers open their eyes. If Microsoft says “pay up”, they reach for their wallets. If Microsoft says “suck”, they kneel.

    If a competitor arises to Windows, then Microsoft will have to actually start worrying about losing customers to Steam OS. More importantly, every customer who switches to Steam OS is one who isn’t paying for Game Pass and one who isn’t buying games from the Microsoft Store and paying Microsoft their 30%.


  • Valve is not well meaning. No large for-profit company is ever well-meaning. It’s merely the case that Valve’s best interest happens to align with those of the consumer, and they have decided that their business model is going to be to win over consumers’ loyalty through goodwill rather than milking them for every penny they can get. And they are very successful at this, seeing that there has still not arisen any serious competitor to Steam. That’s entirely because consumers are loyal to the platform. Valve provides a good service, consumers reward them with loyalty. It’s not friendship, but it’s symbiotic, which is as close as you can get to friendship in the harsh world of business.





  • You can determine density using a scale, string, and some water, but this wouldn’t be reliable enough to determine silver purity beyond 1-1½ significant figures. 950‰-970‰ pure silver would probably be within the margin of error you’d expect for 999‰ pure silver. That silver is basically “contaminated” from a dealer’s perspective because it’s unsellable due to being a strange purity and would have to be refined into 999 silver at a significant cost.

    Dealers don’t do this. A Sigma Pro machine is easier, more reliable, and faster.

    For that reason, if you only had 1 ozt of it (or even 10 ozt), a dealer would maybe generously offer you half or two-thirds of melt value.






  • Trump designs are a dime-a-dozen in silver rounds. I’ve come across at least two just from buying random amounts of them in bulk from billion dealers.

    They are sold to suckers for way too much money and then are sold back to bullion dealers for a dollar fifty under their melt value so that the sucker in question can make the interest payment on their Ford F150. They eventually meet a gnarly end in someone’s furnace after a few years and are cast into some actually desirable silver jewellery or silver bars.


  • I saw these being talked about on r/silverbugs, Reddit’s silver-collecting community. There is definitely a higher-than-usual concentration of Trump supporters there and even they were lambasting it for being a dumb thing to buy.

    The thing is, these can’t even legally be called “coins”. A coin is only called that if it’s made with sanction from the state. Privately-made coin-like objects are “rounds”. Silver rounds are pretty common and are basically all worth melt value. I have no doubt these “commemorative coins rounds” will meet their end five or ten years from now in someone’s backyard kiln who will unceremoniously melt them down and cast them into some nice jewellery or a silver figurine.

    Edit: I actually have some Trump design silver rounds. Not official Trump products, of course (or maybe they are, IDK). They are very common and worth nothing more than melt value. I paid melt value of these two. I traded one of them to my former roommate who’s a Trump supporter for a cod.

    Definitely going to keep the “never surrender” round that has his mugshot that they took after he surrendered though.





  • It does not ignore any information.

    The cost per kWh is the totality of all information. It is the end product. That is the total costs of everything divided by the number of kilowatt-hours of electricity produced.

    I understand that you’re deeply invested in this argument, but you’ve lost. You’re repeating the same claim over and over, and when proven wrong, you just said “nuh uh” and pretended that nothing I said is true.

    Nuclear energy can be cheaper than solar or wind. It is more reliable than solar and wind. It uses less land than solar or wind. All of these are known facts. That’s why actual scientists support expanding nuclear energy 2 to 1.

    But people will still dislike it because they’re scared of building the next Three Mile Island or Fukushima. That, as I explained, is the reason why fewer nuclear plants are being built. Because the scientists, the ones who know the most about these, are not in charge. Instead, it’s the people in the last column that are calling the shots. Do not repeat this drivel of “iF nUcLeaR pOweR PlanTs So Good WhY aRen’T tHerE moRe of ThEM??”. I have explained why. It is widely known why. Your refusal to accept reality does not make it less real.

    That is the end of the argument. I will not respond to anything else you say, because it is clear to me that no amount of evidence will cause you to change your mind. So go ahead, post your non-chalant reply with laughing emojis and three instances of “lol” or “lmao” and strut over the chessboard like you’ve won.

    Because I don’t give a pigeon’s shit what you have to say any more.