HaiZhung

What many posters in this thread fail to realize is that there is a very good reason why steam hasn’t been hit by the enshittification that otherwise permeates human existence in 2024.

Of course, Gaben as their CEO has the last say in it. And he’s just a good guy. But wait, aren’t there other companies that have good guys as their CEO and yet the enshittification persists?

The profound reason is that Valve is not a publicly traded company. They have no obligation to any investors to make number go up. They are a private company, they can do whatever the fuck they want. If they stay flat and keep paying their employees, that’s totally fine, and there is 0 pressure on them to change anything. THAT‘s why Valve seems like such a different company compared to everything else that’s out there.

Of course it’s still a choice to go public or not, and they have made the right call (for us consumers).

Indeed, what the hell is this article?

I’d like to relay this comment from hacker news: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36834046

It seems there's news of a battery breakthrough every week. I've learned to temper expectations, because so many "breakthroughs" turn out to be dead ends. Because it's not enough for a battery to be incredibly light, or made of abundant materials, or last for ten thousand cycles. It needs to be good at many things and at least okay at most things.

E.g.—

• How much capacity per dollar?

• How much capacity per kilogram?

• How much capacity per litre?

• How quickly can it be charged?

• How quickly can it be discharged?

• How much energy is lost between charging and discharging?

• How predisposed is it to catching fire?

• How available are the materials needed to manufacture it?

• How available are the tools/skills required to manufacture it?

• How resilient is it to mechanical stress, e.g. vibration?

• How much does performance degrade per cycle?

• How much does performance degrade when stored at a high state of charge?

• How much does performance degrade when stored at a low state of charge?

• How much does performance drop at high temperatures?

• How much does performance drop at low temperatures?

• How well can it be recycled at end-of-life?

A sufficiently bad answer for any one of these could utterly exclude it from contention as an EV battery. A battery which scores well on everything except mechanical resilience is a non-starter, for example. Though it might be great for stationary storage. I'm only a layperson and this list is what I came up with just a few minutes of layperson thought. I'm sure someone with more familiarity with battery technology could double the length of this list. But the point is, when you daydream about some hypothetical future battery tech, you need to appreciate just how well today's lithium chemistries score in so many areas

While I appreciate the sentiment, I think it’s unrealistic to expect the greenhouse gas concentration in the atmosphere to decrease. For that, we already would need net 0 emissions AND some sort of carbon capture system in place.

For now, what must decrease is greenhouse gas emissions, and the article admits that that is what happened (but the decrease was so low it could be attributed to natural fluctuations).

Im not sure what you are talking about, carbon taxes are one of the best ways to mitigate co2 emissions.

If two producers produce the same good, but one of them emits less co2, that one will have higher profit margins.

This is just one of the levers to nudge industries (who, let’s be real, are the main polluters) towards cleaner operations, and as far as I am informed, it’s one of the most effective ways.

So this is good news. It’s good. We have to celebrate that, too, lest we all suffer from doomerism. Can more be done? Yes, there is always more to be done.

But is this a good, important step?

Definitely.

This is the correct answer, this shit is „your carbon footprint“ all over again

What’s missing is what a huge difference the media makes. Once you control the media, you basically control the country, as can be seen in Hungary, Poland and Russia. All of these states have put in massive efforts to install their own cronies as media leadership, and you can see this happening in other countries too. Now it’s Italy.

Then on the other hand, you have billionaires that flood the people with cheap tabloid bullshit, of course to paralyze honest debates around things that actually matter (climate change, wealth inequality, etc) and instead refocus the populace on scape goats (LGBTQ rights, abortion, etc).

Far too often, „serious“ media fails to defend against the bullshit, and at some point will also report on these „issues“ as „this is what the country is talking about“. What they are ignoring is that this conversation is deliberately led by bad actors, and by picking it up they are legitimizing their positions.

Then they invite complete lunatics to discussion to provide a „balanced viewpoint“, when there is no balanced viewpoint to be had for certain issues: the earth is round, climate change is happening, and it is our fault. Period. There can be no further discussions on the facts.

The misinformation campaigns are massive, the astroturfing is massive, and is probably happening even here. It is too cheap and works too well to not do it.