Yes, and notably, this isn't about regular blood donation. Plasma donation specifically is a time consuming process, taking 1-2 hours. I don't think not compensating regular blood donors results in the same kind of shortage.

The status quo is dependence on paid plasma, we import about 80% of our plasma from the US, because you don't get enough donors when you don't compensate them. Everyone else in the donation chain gets compensated (phlebotomists, doctors, nurses, receptionist...), and there's nothing wrong with compensating the donor as well.

Spring singleton beans are supposed to be stateless though, so they can't be called variables. Maybe the DI aspect of Spring is less relevant today in the micro service era, but in the day Spring helped make layered monolith apps much cleaner.

It's good that they have this, but there are a lot of situations involving cops where it's not going to be safe to stick your hand in your pocket. I'll just leave the biometrics off on my devices.

SoTN is available on ps4 in a collection called Castlevania Requiem (with Rondo of Blood). It often goes on sale for 5 bucks or so. Though I understand the frustration of gamers without a ps4 or ps5.

You're parroting the line of dumb conspiracy theories known as Gamergate 2 pushed by a bunch of grifters farming engagement on YouTube.

Narrative consultancy companies like SBI don't force you to hire them, and if you choose to hire them, you don't have to follow all of their advice.

If you're interesting in curing yourself of the mindworms the YouTube algorithm has planted in your brain, please check this out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGmESJM6BFQ

VS Codium exists which takes everything Microsoft out of open source VS Code. But anyway, fuck Google and MS.

It’s not illegal to have a better product, only to use your market position to keep other products from trying to compete.

That's exactly what the lawsuit alleges though. The only way smaller featured storefronts have to compete with Steam is on price. Valve uses its market dominance to prohibit offering a better price on smaller stores. If you offer a better price on Epic, Valve will kick you off Steam.

Yo mama so ugly...

They don't offer lower prices on Epic because Valve bullies publishers into matching the price with Steam. Valve threatens to delist the game from Steam if a lower price is available elsewhere, using their market dominance to prevent smaller stores from competing the only way they realistically can -- on price.

epic. All of which are perfectly successful without using steam.

This entire lemmy post is about someone being upset that Epic is successful enough to have an exclusive. If a few large players can still succeed without Steam, it's not proof that Steam's practices aren't making the market worse for consumers.

If they can’t make sufficient revenue without valves advertisement and distribution network, then maybe the service is worth the price valve charges for it.

Listing your product on Steam isn't advertising. They're not promoting your game unless you pay them.

Let's make an analogy. Is it reasonable for Nordstrom to go after a company selling the same product at Wal-Mart cheaper?

Valve has done nothing to stop consumers from using other stores

If we lived in a world where Epic was allowed to compete with Steam on the only way it can, with lower prices, we might have cheaper prices on Steam, and a more robust competitive market. This is why Valve is doing this price fixing. They know that consumers are price sensitive, and a $55 price tag on a new game going for $60 on Steam would be a disaster for them. They know their price fixing department would have to become a "watch for prices on other platforms and adjust our prices / cut to be competitive" department.

Some games choose to skip steam and use epic. Epic pays them to do so, and the publisher doesn’t lower prices.

Evidence? Even if we went down the list of launch Epic exclusives and somehow determined that the price is equivalent to what it would launch at on Steam, the economics of an exclusive launch on a smaller platform are going to be completely different.

If you’re a publisher, why would you want to offer a lower price elsewhere?

Maybe ask the publishers who got together to sue Valve for the ability to do this, and check their many examples of comms with Valve where Valve was upset that publishers were offering lower prices on other platforms.

The appeal to a lower cut to you is higher revenue, not equivalent revenue.

There is a phenomenon called price elasticity. Example, a 5% price cut might result in 10% more units sold, giving you higher revenue.

If you don't like giving money to rich assholes, I have some bad news for you about Valve.

They're in a class action lawsuit now over price fixing. They're kicking games off Steam if their publishers offer games at lower prices on cheaper stores. They're trying to be a monopoly.

The lawsuit already has several public examples of communications between Valve and publishers where Valve is all "whoah whoah you can't be selling that cheap on another store!". Publishers want to offer lower prices. The economics make sense, passing on some of the savings to consumers will result in an increase in revenue, this is also what the expert economists in the lawsuit are going to be testifying.

If you're big enough to not be using Steam, you're what, Ubisoft or EA? (and even these are using Steam these days.)

VS Code is arguably similarly dominant. By Stack Overflow survey, it's around 75% of the IDE market (source https://visualstudiomagazine.com/...) while Chrome seems around 65%. It's a bit apples to oranges because the IDE survey lets you select multiple items, but it's a very widely used tool. Google and Microsoft both have a lot of closed source crap, and they both copy everything you do to the NSA.

“The general consensus has been that there is more Fifth Amendment protection for passwords than there is for biometrics,” Andrew Crocker, the Surveillance Litigation Director at the EFF, told Gizmodo in a phone interview. “The 5th Amendment is centered on whether you have to use the contents of your mind when you’re being asked to do something by the police and turning over your password telling them your password is pretty obviously revealing what’s in your mind.”

However, the panel said the evidence from his phone was lawfully acquired “because it required no cognitive exertion, placing it in the same category as a blood draw or a fingerprint taken at booking..."

If the precedent is that unlocking the phone is the same category as fingerprint taking, well, what happens if you refuse to be "coerced" into having your prints taken? Even if the legal precedent isn't fully understood, it looks like the reasoning here isn't based on whether there was physical force applied, but whether the search required the contents of the person's mind.

Like the photo, good composition, but remember to level the horizon 👍

I’ve also gotten steam keys through Itch.io.

Cool, but myself and I bet most others don't bother making accounts on other sites for the same price as Steam.

So you can sell your games at steam sale prices 100% of the time and have a higher price on steam. So you’re literally just wrong.

Source or example of someone doing this (regular price on reseller is lower than regular price on Steam)? The legal documents contain plenty of examples of Valve even complaining when there's a sale on another platform but no comparably priced sale on Steam recently. I can't imagine they'd tolerate basically a permanent sale.