Which is exactly why it's vital for governments and their regulatory bodies to step in and protect the ordinary citizen who isn't an expert on these things from the abuse that the big companies who are will otherwise commit in the name of profit, just as they already do with financial services, caterers, healthcare providers, and so on.

Fantastic. Then we can go back to having dumb devices that just do their jobs and don't have all the other junk attached competing for the market instead. That worked for a few generations before all the 1984 stuff. I'm betting it will work just fine for generations after it too.

And please spare us the rhetoric about how nothing could possibly be affordable if it doesn't violate our privacy to help pay for itself. The difference in pricing in a competitive market is likely to be pretty small. The only reason they can get away with intruding as much as they do right now is that market competition has failed because everyone is lapping up the free money. I, for one, am glad the ICO has other ideas about how things should be .

In fact we had that here fairly recently, some older people who lost their home and had nowhere to go squatted in it and burned it down with a candle, with themselves inside of it.

they sell themselves.

Either that or they're so unavoidable that people pretty much have to buy them, so crappy AI sales agents are quite enough.

Wars they didn't start, except with terrorism?

What you said didn't contradict what I said in any way, so it was purely worthless whataboutism.

I learned to recognize that kind of shit in grade school.

Wise up.

Moving the goalposts much?

I love it when people try to "win" an argument by denying what they wrote earlier.

Yeah, I figured that. My point was just that "fixed" is just an accurate description of my income/budget (and probably yours) as it is of hers. I knew what you meant, I was just pointing out that the terminology we use doesn't make sense.

The price of a cryptocurrency reflects those things. It's value is zero. Period. There is nothing behind it.

No, fiat currencies are backed by debt, meaning that real people and companies have made enforceable legal commitments to do real work to generate the value backing the dollars or whatever. Without getting into the details, every time a dollar is created, that creation is balanced by the creation of a dollar of debt, the commitment of some productive entity to produce value to repay that debt (and thereby destroy that dollar). As a common example, when you borrow money to buy a house, the bank doesn't lend you money [*] that other people deposited, it creates that money out of thin air at the same instant you sign an enforceable contract to repay it, meaning you commit to do some sort of value-producing work to generate the value of those dollars.

Derivatives represent specific legal contracts to perform some action, e.g. buy a fixed amount of stock from the derivative seller on or by a specific date for a specific price, and those contracts get their value from the underlying security. That underlying security can also be some sort of contractual obligation rather than a hard asset, but if you keep digging down the layers you always get to something real. It's always possible, of course, that the layers of repackaging make the actual value hard enough to see that its price becomes divorced from that value (and stock pricing also gets divorced from underlying value to various degrees), but at bottom there must be something of actual substance. Further, if markets were perfectly efficient, it would not be possible for the price to move away from the value.

None of this is true with cryptoassets. Their true value is zero (arguably, negative, since proof of work is a pure sink that generates no utility), so any price above zero represents market inefficiency/insanity.

[*] It used to be that the bank created most of the money under the fractional reserve system, but for quite a while now most of the developed world has abandoned the reserve lending requirements, enabling banks to effectively create all of the money they lend. This might seem like a crazy system, but it's actually pure genius because it allows the money supply to expand and contract with the economy, which along with Keynsian fiscal policy massively reduces the boom and bust cycles we regularly experienced before we switched from metallic to fiat currency.

Why don't you try learning to read without making things up sometime? I never claimed that the poor fucker turned into hamburger wasn't killed. What I said is that you're a gullible toolbag because you believe that Trump was shot with no evidence.

Aside: That phrase "fixed budget" and its twin "fixed income" always strike me as curious. I mean, short of changing jobs, most of us have a fixed income and therefore a fixed budget... and changing jobs isn't necessarily an option.

I guess maybe it's just a euphemism for "small income" or "small budget".

The way Trump got elected is that republicans have been fucking up education since Reagan. You want to blame the Democrats?

Cold doesn't burn down buildings, and unless they are in the path of a glacier... Ok, that's snarky, there's hail and snow and such. But go ahead and price insurance for those.

You can also dual boot Windows on the steam deck. Presumably you will soon be able to dual boot steam OS on some Xbox branded hardware like the Asus ROG Xbox Ally (do I have the name in the right order? Whatever.)

Now, no. That would allow competition and they still sell hardware at a loss.

Eventually, probably. All the console makers will probably be forced to open their platforms sooner or later, at least in some markets.

So far they have moved away from console exclusives to publishing almost all of their own titles for at least Xbox and PC. They are headed that direction as slowly as possible.