sushibowl

joined 2 years ago
[–] [email protected] 7 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

A price is usually set to cover the initial costs and to make a reasonable profit not to squeeze how much money you can from people.

There are exceptions, but usually that is absolutely not true. Making as much money as you can is 100% the goal for the vast majority of goods produced, physical or digital.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

You can also view it as a strategy to extract more money from richer people, without sacrificing all the poorer customers.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago (19 children)

Can you elaborate where your confusion lies? It's a digital good, there is no marginal cost. So they can pretty much price a game however they want. So pricing is mostly about maximising revenue, i.e. get as many sales as you can at the highest possible price.

A sale is a relatively straightforward strategy where you first sell the game at a high price to all the people who are fine with paying a lot, then you lower the price to sell more copies to the people who weren't willing to pay the higher price. The result is more total profit. There is a time limit too to create a sense of urgency ("I better buy now so I don't miss the opportunity").

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 week ago

Both, really. There's been encoding improvements every generation, but they also use different slices of the spectrum.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Usually when code dumps like these happen they don't include any of the art assets. That's why you still need to get the game on steam to run it, to download the sprites and what not. Has nothing to do with the code enforcing anything.

I don't know about these particular releases though, I could be wrong.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

This applies to all cars. I don't think there's ever a situation where you should buy a completely new vehicle over a used one that's 2-5 years old. The value proposition is just insane

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 weeks ago

He's the NATO chief, and NATO is basically the embodiment of America militarily defending Europe. Of course he wants Trump and Zelensky to make up and kiss. He's just saying what his job demands him to say.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

VAT is a universal tax on goods. A tariff is basically a tax that applies only to imported goods. So a tariff distorts the market, making imports from a region more expensive relative to other regions, or domestic goods.

Note that basically any tax is bad from an economic perspective. However for the government to function revenues must be raised. It is considered better for market efficiency to raise revenues in such a way as to least distort the market. Tariffs are a very distorting instrument, VAT is generally considered less distorting because it affects all parts of the market equally.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 3 weeks ago (4 children)

The US needs to do way more than invest into public transit. You need to completely rethink city planning to get something suitable for human travel. Suburban America is like the antithesis to public transportation (or god forbid, walking).

[–] [email protected] 77 points 3 weeks ago (10 children)

No magnetic confinement fusion reactor in existence has ever generated a positive output. The current record belongs to JET, with a Q factor of 0.67. This record was set in 1997.

The biggest reason we haven't had a record break for a long time is money. The most favourable reaction for fusion is generally a D-T (Deuterium-Tritium) reaction. However, Tritium is incredibly expensive. So, most reactors run the much cheaper D-D reaction, which generates lower output. This is okay because current research reactors are mostly doing research on specific components of an eventual commercial reactor, and are not aiming for highest possible power output.

The main purpose of WEST is to do research on diverter components for ITER. ITER itself is expected to reach Q ≥ 10, but won't have any energy harvesting components. The goal is to add that to its successor, DEMO.

Inertial confinement fusion (using lasers) has produced higher records, but they generally exclude the energy used to produce the laser from the calculation. NIF has generated 3.15MJ of fusion output by delivering 2.05MJ of energy to it with a laser, nominally a Q = 1.54. however, creating the laser that delivered the power took about 300MJ.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Sort of, browsers can run rust code through webassembly. But i dont think this is a full replacement for JavaScript as of yet.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

You might think that, but the United States exited from the Paris agreement on climate change mitigation twice: Trump first withdrew in November of 2020, then Biden rejoined in February of 2021, and now Trump is withdrawing for the second time.

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