This is an issue because of Steam's 30% cut.

Other retailers take a smaller cut. But because Steam mandates that the Steam storefront always gets the lowest price, publishers can't take advantage of that lower cut to offer lower prices. They can only lower the price to something that doesn't torpedo them with a 30% cut on Steam.

SHHHH!!!

Monopolies and authoritarians aren't bad as long as people like them! Hadn't you heard?

The person I was arguing with was saying that "infrastructure is anything which is something anyone can do". I gave an example of something that anyone can do which isn't infrastructure.

It's absolutely a direct refuation --- a counter-example which disproves their original statement. It's not a "straw man", as much as you get mad and scream that it is.

I know that shouting "straw man!" is the first step of trying to deflect from being wrong on the Internet... But if you're going to do it, at least know what a straw man is.

My argument is that "Infrastructure" != "anyone can do it".

Infrastructure is something that benefits and maintains the general public. Bitcoin benefits a handful of cryptobros, billionaires... and most importantly ransomware rings.

I'm not using the sewer when I shit my pants. I don't think you understand pants.

In a sense. They're also fancy-pants enterprise drives rated to be able to last over a million hours.

Drive failures follow the old "bathtub curve". You get the lemons that fail when they're brand new -- that's one side of the curve. Then for several years, they fail at a consistently low rate. Then once they start getting really old, the failure rate goes up -- giving you the other side of the curve.

True, these are probably closer to the "old age" side of the bathtub curve. But GHD is pretty good about honoring their warranty. Back stuff up and you should be fine.

Anyone can shit their pants. Is that "infrastructure"?

They're still around. It's just very different since COVID happened. And I'm old.

Just bought a bunch of $75 12TB disks from GoHardDrive's eBay storefront.

Still running through the diagnostics, but nothing has jumped out yet, 48hrs in. Sure, they're 4 years old and have over a petabyte of lifetime writes. They also have 5 year warranties.

• Nextlander
• Fire Escape
• Jeff Gerstmann

(Yes, I'm a Giant Bomb refugee.)

"It's only the 10th most played game on Steam. DeAD gAMe!!"