I actually think this might also potentially have something to do with the lawsuit regarding potential gambling on the platform.

Because children absolutely could buy gift cards and use them to open loot boxes etc. Not positive but just throwing that out there.

I absolutely could be completely wrong about this.

Yeah. Like. I get it. People are pissed because passenger vehicles in the US keep getting bigger and more unweildy and people don’t want them on the road because of the danger to pedestrians.

But at the same time, the people who service your roads, power lines and water systems and respond to emergency situations still have to drive on them.

Just because he’s being overdramatic about his own vehicle doesn’t mean he’s not right.

I am not denying the danger. Take a moment to understand that just because the vehicle is dangerous doesn’t mean anything as far as this particular complaint is concerned. My point had exactly zero percent of anything to do with what you’re arguing.

Even if this truck were lower to the ground (like the F150-F350 trucks of the 1990’s and early 2000’s) that still wouldn’t necessarily equate to a turning radius that would allow such a vehicle (looking at you fucking ambulances built on an F350 chassis) to turn the corner without edging into oncoming traffic which is against the law and is unsafe.

You can stop yelling at me. I’m not a yee yee truck driver. I’m not saying that this is meant to be a normal commuter vehicle.

I even agree with you that they’re dangerous. I never advocated for them to be used by everyday people. But they don’t require a CDL. Nor do they require any special license. And municipality’s use them all over for various tasks. So if the municipality uses a vehicle like that in normal operations the road should be able to safely accommodate it.

It sounds to me like you haven’t been in a Ford truck for some time and you’re basing your opinion on safety rating information for certain events where the occupants aren’t wearing seatbelts and don’t take the proper precautions to prevent things from flying around the vehicle in a crash.

No offense but vehicles are better built for safety now than they were the previous 5 years, 10 years, 20 years etc. But this isn’t about safety in the event of a crash. If you mean ability to see pedestrians in front, this is true but it also has nothing to do with their ability to safely turn a corner without going into incoming traffic to do so.

Newer vehicles generally have better turning radii than older ones. I know for a fact that there are some passenger vehicles on the road including municipal working vehicles and ambulances that can’t make that turn safety without jumping the curb. With those rods extended upward vertically the front or rear bumper of a larger vehicle with a worse turning radius can’t clear that without breaking the law and swinging into oncoming traffic.

There is a reason that the law states that you must drive as if there are other people on the road.

As far as the argument about not all roads being required to support all vehicles, every road should generally be able to facilitate an ambulance being driven on it (not even in an emergency situation, but in general).

So while I admit that his personal truck can safely make that turn with no problem, that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a point.

I would love to hear from a civil engineer or city planning engineer about this.

I’m from an old American city with some of the narrowest roads and residential streets and I wouldn’t discount his argument just because it doesn’t effect him.

Not every truck a municipality’s public works department uses is this size. You don’t need special licensing to drive a dual wheel F350 long bed, and I’d wager that might be a problem to turn that corner depending on what it has in it. If they need to replace signs, or even just do road work, they need to be able to turn that corner. I have a lot of questions about this.

What happens when it’s an ambulance (a lot of those are built on f450 chassis and don’t require a CDL).

Any municipal vehicle. They don’t get sewage backups or anything? They never need an ambulance?

No offense but that’s a basic F150 Ram 1500. It’s got one of the shortest beds of the lineup.

A vehicle with a longer bed or dual wheels, or even with a trailer (say a municipal vehicle for the sake of argument) might have trouble making that turn. It’s not necessarily that his personal truck can’t do it. Just because his truck can doesn’t mean all vehicles can.

It needs to be safe enough for all vehicles that might have to travel that road.

No problem. I have ad blockers on ad blockers but I can see how it might be problematic for people on more locked down hardware.

It’s been the biggest mystery of the year: What video game publisher will have the guts to go up against Grand Theft Auto this November? An empty fall release date schedule left some major questions as players waited to see where anticipated games like Marvel’s Wolverine and Control Resonant would land. After today’s PlayStation State of Play, we finally have our answer to that question: No one. November remains wide open for GTA 6 as it appears that every major holiday video game will instead try to launch in September. Good luck to anyone trying to make that work, because September just became a 200 car pile-up.

Prior to Tuesday’s State of Play stream, we knew that a handful of major games were already planting their flag in September. Blood of the Dawnwalker recently announced a Sept. 3 launch. (Phantom Blade Zero had Sept. 9 locked down for a while before it was delayed to October.) The heavy hitters will continue on Sept. 15, which Sony has now claimed for Marvel’s Wolverine. Things will really heat up the following week, though. Tuesday’s State of Play stream revealed that Control Resonant will launch on Sept. 24, the same day as Silent Hill Townfall. Onimusha: Way of the Sword will drop one day later on Sept. 25. That’s three of the year’s most anticipated games landing in a two-day span.

Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve just narrowly avoided that disaster with an Oct. 2 release date, but it’s still flying too close for comfort. Deluxe Edition holders will get access to it on Sept. 28, so I’m counting that as a September release. The only game that seemed to get away from the dogpile was Rayman Legends Retold, but not by much: It will release on Oct. 1, which, look, if five bucks is eight bucks, that’s September.

That’s just scratching the surface, as a few other games are stuck in that crossfire, too. Dune: Awakening will come to PS5 on Sept. 22 with new content, and RPG-heads have Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter waiting for them on Sept. 17, and Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 4 is on the menu for Sept. 17.

Keep in mind that today’s State of Play is only the beginning of what’s likely to be a busy week for release dates. A Summer Game Fest stream is scheduled for this Friday, which will most certainly fill out the rest of the fall release calendar. Considering how many games have steered clear of GTA 6’s Nov. 19 date already, you can assume that September is going to look a whole lot busier by the end of the week.

At this point, I’m starting to wonder if some of these games would stand a better chance in and around November. Does Silent Hill Townfall really have a significant enough audience crossover with Grand Theft Auto that it couldn’t launch a few weeks before it in time for Halloween? Would something like Rayman Legends Retold do just fine in early December considering that it’s targeting kids? Publishers are undoubtedly going to be asking questions like this when the dust clears this week. Don’t treat any September release dates that you learn about this week to be set in stone aside from those for the biggest games. This fall is going to be one messy game of musical chairs.

Perhaps (I am not condoning doxxing) he should have thought about the consequences of his actions a little more. Seems like the comment about paying the fine incensed some people to take it further.

There’s always someone out there willing to out crazy you or at the very least stoop to a level of immorality that you won’t.

They lost their minds because Nintendo said:

Last week, Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa told shareholders that the house of Mario had no current plans to raise the price of its $449.99 Switch 2.

Then they raised the price of the original switch and a bunch of the accessories.

Then the tariffs in the US were deemed to be illegal and they sued to get their money profit back and didn’t want to repay the price increase they passed along to their customers.

There’s also the fact that Nintendo was on a lot of people’s shit lists for their litigiousness and other anti-consumer crap they had done so people were already mad at them before they raised prices.

When you look at it that way, Sony (who were also on people’s shit lists for a laundry list of reasons) are no better in many’s eyes.

Also, this completely ignores how small a company Valve is in comparison to Nintendo and Sony. I think that’s the main problem actually. Valve isn’t a hardware power house and they can’t command the kind of sales contracts or parts/fab that Nintendo or Sony can. So they are less likely to be able to withstand raising prices on their hardware as a result. The fact that they have raised prices so late in comparison to their counterparts in the space is interesting even if you don’t find it laudable.

At the end of the day, the backlash that Sony and Nintendo faced wasn’t because of the price increase so much as it was because of all the other stuff.

Requiring proprietary hardware for $80+ games that almost never go on sale or have online subscription services that also keep going up, and then anti-consumer practices like (in Sony’s case) the whole have to have an account to play their games on PC and not wanting to issue refunds where a PS account wasn’t available but people bought the game and oh well we just won’t port our games to PC at all then, and so on.

Like. There’s way more to it than Valve good, Sony/Nintendo bad.

Yeah, I wonder if this will lead to a lot of the original Lenovo legion go’s selling out. They’ve basically been on perpetual sale for awhile now. They have somewhat better hardware so for people in the market who don’t mind installing Linux, they’d be a pretty good option.

Assuming the steam deck is even in stock in your region.

I don’t think it should have been a problem to provide her with tap water (rather than mineral water which is not the same thing), especially since she offered to pay for it. Is there something wrong with the tap water?

Agreed. Headlines more and more rely on outrage for clicks.

It’s not physically bricking anything. It’s a firmware modification that prevents two pieces of hardware from talking to each other.

That’s because what it actually does is change your system firmware so that a physical piece of hardware commonly used for cheating will no longer connect and be available. It doesn’t actually brick anything. It prevents a handshake. It’d be like if a piece of software was able to go in and unmount your hard drive. Nothing is wrong with your computer. Nothing is wrong with the hard drive. They just don’t talk to each other anymore.

Valve makes you buy a key to open the loot boxes.

Valve then allows the contents of loot boxes to be traded for platform currency.

Unfortunately that platform currency has a real monetary value because it can be traded for real monetary goods because you can use it to buy a steam deck of other valve hardware.

It is this direct chain of events that make this illegal gambling because this is not something you can do with baseball cards or Pokemon cards.

three core elements common to all gambling laws: (1) consideration, (2) chance, and (3) prize. So long as one of these three elements is not met, a loot box system is not “gambling”. The “chance” element is inevitably met in any form of loot boxes, but the “consideration” element can arguably be avoided by making loot boxes acquirable only by exchanging virtual currency that itself arguably has no “value”, and the “prize” element can arguably be avoided by making the loot box drops account-locked. Where the loot box drop cannot be transferred, sold, or “cashed out”, there is arguably no “prize” no matter how rare the drop is or how useful it is for in-game purposes.[1]

Valve allows users to cash in on the virtual items they have won in two ways. Users can sell the items they won through Valve’s own virtual marketplace, the Steam Community Market, where they can use the proceeds to buy other video games, video game hardware, and other virtual items. Users can also connect their Valve accounts to third-party marketplaces where the virtual items can be sold directly for cash. The OAG’s investigation found that Valve facilitates and even assists these third-party marketplaces in their operations.

All three games feature an optional mechanic where players can pay real money in exchange for “loot boxes”: a virtual item that drops a randomly-generated piece of cosmetic gear that can be used in-game. Most of these items have no mechanical impact and are there strictly for looks, such as silly hats in TF2 or neon-painted “weapon skins” in CS2.

Despite their lack of actual effect, loot boxes and item trading are both an extraordinarily lucrative market for Valve. Virtual items for these three games have been sold for staggering amounts of real money. One estimate cited by the AG’s office indicates that the market for Counter-Strike skins alone was worth over $4.3 billion as of last year.

While Valve absolutely benefits from the strangely frenetic market for virtual items in CS2, TF2, and Dota 2 — it sells these loot boxes in the first place, and hosts the secondary market for them via the in-app Steam Marketplace — the occasionally shocking prices for these items is part of a player-created economy. The lawsuit may be partially aimed in the wrong direction.

Nah. I actually thought the same at first. I literally asked when this was first announced in the news if it wasn’t basically the same as Pokemon cards.

The problem is this. The company producing the Pokemon cards isn’t I hope actively providing a service to trade or resell them for monetary value based on rarity. Secondary markets exist for that but a first party Pokemon company market doesn’t exist for that.

This is where valve fucked up. They allow you to get a rare drop by chance, trade it for points, and use those points to buy something with real world value. It’s a lot more like pachinko than it is Pokemon cards or baseball cards.

In a casino you buy chips. Those chips can then be traded back to the casino for cash. When you bet on things at the casino you bet chips with the understanding that those chips are work a real world amount of money.

That is what makes gambling illegal in a lot of places. The ability to convert the gambled assets directly into spendable currency.

Pachinko does it a little different. You pay to play and when you win you get little trinkets. The pachinko parlor doesn’t let you trade them for cash or anything else. But you can go next door to a place that will buy those little trinkets for actual cash. Valve shouldn’t let you trade the points for anything with a fixed actual monetary value. Which is likely what they will do going forward if this lawsuit is successful.

This is one of the few times I’d agree that Valve is the bad guy. I think other companies are also wrong for this. I think they all should be part of this lawsuit and I think legislation needs to have more repercussions for loot box BS.