I might be willing to say "Fuck Off", if I had some reason to care about the amount of pay I received given a UBI. I would also be more inclined to work for free, returning to the care free days of my youth where I provided tech support services over the internet for free. $3 for a little extra discretionary income, or monies to facilitate impressing a girl I have my eye on, might not be something I would dismiss out of hand anymore. Now, if I could get much more than that for higher skill work, I might indeed say "Fuck Off", in a nice way, and let the next guy have that $3, while I get a job that can afford a sports car to impress that girl I was talking about earlier. I suppose what I am trying to say, it isn't whether the deal is lousy, but what my ambitions would require at the time.
I wish I could upvote this, it makes a tremendous amount of sense.
There are likely to be short-term single generation signs of failure with a UBI. With concerns about how it might affect trade in the global economy, and or the impact on the global economy itself.
Then you also have immigration reform to consider. Once a nation has a powerful economic model, such as a functional UBI model with a fair standard of living, it is quite likely that it will draw immigrants from other nations which will serve to dilute that standard of living.
Sustaining an economy at a certain UBI will require investments in infrastructure. A populace can do so, but that populace will need raw materials, which will have to be acquired from the global economy, which will mean the ability to sustain a populace will be based on exports and/or trade from the nation itself.
So after that third generation, what will the global economic fallout be, and what can be done to transition into the UBI?
That's one way to put it, I suppose. What I'm building off of is the implication that for one couple, free shit makes life easier to the tune of the difference of whatever they were making, and $60k. So potentially $20k-$30k easier. I think we could all agree that an extra $20k per year would substantially ease our struggles, potentially getting many of us out of poverty and/or debt. In two years I could have my house paid off, heck at the bare minimum I could afford upkeep on the house I have now, and a $10 per month Netflix subscription!
I find that a bit of mechanical and physical work or processes can bring a balance to a more cerebral work. I find my own IQ level varies based on amount of sleep, diet, exercise, social interaction, and other factors. There are times when some of the tasks are so easy intellectually speaking, that I can have them done in minutes. Other days it might take hours to understand the scope and nature of a similar task, as if I am drugged or half awake. Quite often taking a break and doing something menial provides better results, while still fostering a feeling of being productive. Without a menial labor portion I would have to essentially clock out for a few hours in the middle of a work day, and then return when refreshed.
Those talking about Amazon and Walmart would be Americans, I would expect. I am not under the impression that Canada has a significant presence from those companies in particular. Though, given that Canada would have their own equivalents, and even perhaps a minor presence of either company, the point would be valid.
What confuses me though is the later comment "we are a merit based society". Which I can fully assure that the U.S.A. is not a merit based society. The USA is a capitalist society, not a meritocracy. I've also never heard Canada being referred to as a meritocracy, or otherwise a merit based society.
Which also lends itself to the question of how to measure merit. I thoroughly disagree that capitalism, or profit, is a good discerner of merit.
I also agree with you on point #1, not everybody is trainable for every job. Furthermore, not everybody that is trainable, is trainable to a level of efficiency and mental clarity that is profitable. In this same vein, not everybody is capable of managing a budget to such a fine and visionary degree that they will set themselves up to be billionaires in the future. The blame levied at the poor is likely a symptom of the Dunning-Kruger effect, of overestimating the abilities of the poor, and underestimating the advanced level of their own capabilities.
It seems clear to me that you are trolling. You simply refuse to consider the facts, and concede another's perspective on the matter. Perhaps you are admitting defeat?
Otherwise, what is your rebuttal to the position that those on welfare receive benefits beyond any meager allotment of income which they are given the opportunity to learn how to manage and budget with?
What is your rebuttal on the position that a person on welfare has a guaranteed retirement, and need not budget for retirement or loss of income?
What is your rebuttal on the position that it costs money to compete for raises, and even jobs in the market, and that there is a lot which factors into what kind of salary a person can command?
What is your rebuttal on the position that a person on welfare has more time to spend maintaining their home and vehicle, and other belongings, and has no risk of losing any income from a vehicle that is out of service for repairs? A person on welfare can learn how to fix things, without negatively impacting their employer or their own cashflow. So they don't have to pay somebody else.
Furthermore, being on welfare and not having to afford certain expenses such as daycare, or other such expenses, goes a long way.
A six pack is a coping mechanism. It is a symptom, not a cause. Otherwise a six pack is a peer bonding item, and the peer bonding is what the person values. Community, friendship, camaraderie. Either way, the six pack represents the highlight of an otherwise miserable existence.
No, it was not well thought out, and clearly lacks direct experience in dealing with a wide range of individuals in this matter. Claiming that spending significant amounts on "worthless and harmful" items is the root cause is ignorance.
A lack of hope, or a lack of education and awareness of the costs of various items may be a more appropriate response. Things like cigarettes are addictive. The years of lost savings which are created from just an addiction to cigarettes alone is not readily apparent. So many people believe a $10 per month Netflix subscription is affordable and inexpensive. The low cost of a pack of cigarettes, being it is not a bulk purchase item, hides the high cost of the item from those not sufficiently advanced at budgeting.
Budgetting is a serious art, and a depressing one when you look at a budget and it says it will be 40-70 years before you can retire if you don't go for five years without any "shore leave" or "vacation" or other downtime.
Additionally, what are these individuals working for? What dreams do they have? What motivation? We have provided a template, often referred to as the "American Dream", or "Keeping up with the Jones'". This template may not necessarily be the way to achieving their dreams? How do we help these people figure out what strategy, what tactics, what vision, what kind of life journey leads to what kind of life goals?
I'd like to know how the "working poor" waste "hundreds of dollars every month" or "thousands of dollars every year". I'll have you know a $10 per month Netflix subscription adds (~$100 per year not thousands), adds nearly a decade to amassing replenishment and upkeep costs at a snug poor man's budget. And Netflix is considered to be an inexpensive for of entertainment and relaxation for one's days off, etc.
Poor man's budget:
$300-$500 rent if assisting the landlord with upkeep, $750-$1,000 without.
$1,500 per year automobile upkeep and replacement costs (subtract if trained or apprenticed in auto repair), based on $15,000 minimal replacement cost for a new/like new automobile over a decade.
$50 per month for phone for keeping a job.
$100 per month for auto insurance (Higher costs for insurance given the higher risk of an accident with an uninsured motorist causing a crippling and unrecoverable debt situation.
$100 per month medical coverage can't risk depending on those who don't exist, or who are otherwise similarly lacking in room in their budget.
Plus "Day of Rest" or "shore leave" entertainment expenses to sustain morale over extended periods. (ie. $10 per month Neflix).
Plus taxes and social security, figure about 30%. (I normally factor 40%, and just get a return on the difference at tax time to avoid surprise IRS charges.)
Which creates a baseline starting cost of living of about $3,500 per month. From which investments can reduce that to a more sustainable $1,100 per month if one has capital beyond the $3,500 per month minimum with which to invest in ones self. Given minimum wage is $1,250 per month, is it any surprise that many cannot afford to invest in themselves to lower their cost of living? Of course the variance between $1,100 and $3,500 is going to vary between individual to individual, but $1,250 is only sustainable after a lifetime of experience. The time it takes to get to $1,100 depends on the intellectual capacity of the individual and the money and time available for investing in one's self.
Individuals on welfare are often further subsidized, either by reduced housing costs, free cell phones, or other cost savings, and combined with the increased amount of time to invest in themselves, and the guaranteed income to eliminate the risk of a loss of a job from failures while learning, means that an individual on welfare is in a far greater position to build their skillset than a working person, aside from the lack of exposure to the actual workplace. It is for this reason that I consider anyone on welfare who is not gearing up to become the next Tony Stark, is one who is caught in the welfare trap. Being on welfare one's earning potential is limited to the welfare cap, which often means one must take on additional financial burdens, effectively lowering one's welfare benefit significantly, before exceeding the welfare amount and achieving sustainable financial independence. One must leap from $1,000 per month in expenses, to $4,000 per month in expenses if one is not extremely competent.
Two things: 1. A lawyer, 2. A "training dummy" for debates or other educational pursuits.
If applied to other non-critical, non-life threatening, low risk uses, it can potentially supplant humans in many capacities, such as an I.T. Help Desk. It need not be 100% accurate, just as acccurate as an average human. Being able to fashion a reasonable argument or set of instructions from a trusted dataset is a very useful thing. Though it does take away some of the low risk experience opportunities to develop skills for higher risk situations.
This thing is perhaps most valuable as a "training dummy", to measure ones self against and to improve against.
Not knowledge, however this thing can process vast amounts of knowledge and provide a response which has a very high probability of being correct and/or at the very least relevant, and it can do this in real-time.
If users could follow directions regarding computers, or even have a two-way conversation with this machine, then this thing could take over a third of my duties in I.T. (Handholding, and transliterating). As it stands the machine may reduce my time to research answers, a problem which Google has largely solved.
I suppose this could provide a high level of research to those who need to learn how to research, making them ineffective at their jobs without technology, and unable to accurately access the quality of the technology leading to stagnation and the collapse of modern society.
Deploying this thing in a field of debate shows an effective alternative to reducing the value of intelligence. If we were to capitalize on this for educational and testing purposes, somehow outlawing and blocking its use in commercial environments, it could prove an incredible asset for building a brighter future. We could potentially use this machine to sharpen our brains rather than to dull them.
Near about the same here. 11-12 years or so, nearly 300 titles. Most of the games which don't run on anything newer than XP were added later. With Steam being released so near the release of Windows Vista, and with Vista and Windows 7 being so compatible, any games which were released after Steam went live were likely updated with Windows 7 compatibility.
However, many of the more retro titles may not have gotten the same treatment. Titles originally released in the late 90s, to 2001 or 2002, and some up to 2005, may not work on Windows 7, or if they do they work in limited capacity. I've been running Vista for most of those 12 years, and I've struggled to get several games to run properly on a Vista PC, and I choose my configurations for compatibility more so than performance. I've got one Atari Classics game dumped into an XP Only category, because it only works in Safe Mode on Vista. Most of those problematic titles were probably dumped on Steam before XP was sunset in 2014. Games for Windows Live is a part of the problem for more recent titles though. I'm sure Windows 10 has even more hurdles to overcome to get games working on it, though I haven't tried migrating to Windows 10 for my gaming yet.
Keep in mind, Steam has over 780 million titles, 350 titles is barely a drop in the bucket. If you're going to run into problems they are likely going to happen with titles released during the transition from Windows 9x to Windows XP, and titles with a lot of issues and absolutely no work-arounds or fixes will have likely been pulled from the store (The Atari title was pulled from the Steam Store, another more recent collection has since replaced it).
It was a real nice ride while it lasted. No-CD fixes for titles during the Windows 98 and Windows XP era were popular for a reason. Everybody knew you didn't need the CD-ROM for anything more than licensing validation. Move that licensing validation from the disc to a login and you no longer had to keep track of your CD-ROMs, and CD Keys, and no longer had to worry about scratches. Scratches on frequently played game disc were the bane of a gamer back in the day. Even better it mean you no longer had to keep boxes of discs around, everything became virtual. It was beautiful. With the death of Games for Windows Marketplace, and now the end of XP era support (the first real supported era for Steam), this marks the end of the golden age of Steam.
There is the old world, where items purchased would last as long as you maintained them. A person could provide a very nice living condition over a lifetime. Unsupported merely meant you had to maintain the item yourself.
In the modern 2010+ era, where people don't sell merchandise, but instead they lease services, unsupported means you lose the ability to fix it or even use it. We've been fussing about the right to repair for some time now, and this is part of that same argument.
Windows XP? IOT Devices? The current items are the ISP provided modems which all used the same default credentials, which resulted in the spread of quite a bit of malware. Supposedly a "solved problem", one that the FBI recently had to issue a public statement on.
For games, yes actually. The games are more important than whatever else the OS used to do. At this point in the OS's existence, the OS serves only as a means of accessing content not compatible with more modern OSes. Favorite games, classics. Games which usually do not require an internet to play, other than for the Steam licensing validation. Good old fashioned LAN games or single player games. Put the old OS with unpatched vulnerabilities behind a firewall on a secure network, or take it completely offline if possible (not possible with Steam).
3D Rendering in a VM takes a hit, and game compatibility is iffy. Any 2D titles will work without issue, but games like Deus Ex, or System Shock, or Star Trek Elite Force II, or X-Wing Alliance, etc. Will likely suffer or not work in a VM.
Even still, if the Steam client doesn't work in XP, inside of the VM, the game won't load either.
In the non-subscription non-software-as-a-service world, unsupported software is simply unsupported. It works the same as it did for the last update. It is essentially frozen in time. In the Software as a Service world, unsupported software is software which stops working. It increases the cost of the purchase because the number of years of usability are limited rather than unlimited (or limited to the life of the hardware).
A game which costs $80 USD retail with DLC, will be limited to a decade or so, or about $10 per year per game. Where as a game disc bought during the XP/Vista era could be had for $40-$50 USD, with no DLC to purchase, and 20-30 years of use, or about $1 per year, per game. Not to mention the added cost of the hardware. Older hardware typically gets less expensive over time to replace, so replenishment costs are reduced from $1,000 to $100 over time, so you can buy more than one piece of hardware. And you will be able to build the collection of titles for that system over time. With the SAAS model you will have to replace the entire collection every so many years, with a potentially substantial part of the collection lost all at once. Additionally, you will need to replace the hardware with new hardware to support the supported titles. So instead of the cost of maintaining an comparable collection of games going down, it will increase over time. Which means your collection of video games is likely to shrink over time.
Offline Mode is only temporary for Steam Clients. I believe the duration is a maximum of two weeks. Valve has promised to release a patch to allow games to be played offline if the Steam Service ever goes down permanently, but this change would not seem to qualify.
Some games on Steam require a 17-year old computer, and will not run on anything newer. This change may result in a large number of games being removed from the Steam Store.
Updating the OS isn't that easy. Updating the OS breaks things, like video games. Effectively 50% of the catalog of games I have purchased will be rendered unplayable because they do not run on anything newer than Windows Vista.
Which means I will have to purchase them again on Good old Games, IF, and that is a big IF, they are available through that service. Where there is any crossover the Steam version typically receives the same or similar treatment and thus is compatible with a modern OS.
I am not a fan of spending a significant portion of my hard earned money to keep up with the Jones's. And I spent my $1,000 allotment for the 2015- 2025 decade on a Surface Pro 4 with specs from a decade prior, the Windows XP/Vista era, and is essentially identical in spec to my Windows Vista entertainment PC.
I work in I.T., and the Surface Pro has become the platform of choice. It was an investment in my ability to support my employer during the transition from traditional PCs to Surface Pro devices.
Sierra had a game called Driver's Ed. Whenever I ran into a cop car in the game, the instructor would exclaim "I'm sure the police would be interested to hear YOUR side of the story,...".
If you can't write it into policy, then your employees can't follow it, implement it, or enforce it. Policy interpretation follows a lowest common denominator theory. Every side with a stake in the implementation will push the interpretation as far as they can get away with.
Slashdot Mirror
I might be willing to say "Fuck Off", if I had some reason to care about the amount of pay I received given a UBI. I would also be more inclined to work for free, returning to the care free days of my youth where I provided tech support services over the internet for free. $3 for a little extra discretionary income, or monies to facilitate impressing a girl I have my eye on, might not be something I would dismiss out of hand anymore. Now, if I could get much more than that for higher skill work, I might indeed say "Fuck Off", in a nice way, and let the next guy have that $3, while I get a job that can afford a sports car to impress that girl I was talking about earlier. I suppose what I am trying to say, it isn't whether the deal is lousy, but what my ambitions would require at the time.
I wish I could upvote this, it makes a tremendous amount of sense.
There are likely to be short-term single generation signs of failure with a UBI. With concerns about how it might affect trade in the global economy, and or the impact on the global economy itself.
Then you also have immigration reform to consider. Once a nation has a powerful economic model, such as a functional UBI model with a fair standard of living, it is quite likely that it will draw immigrants from other nations which will serve to dilute that standard of living.
Sustaining an economy at a certain UBI will require investments in infrastructure. A populace can do so, but that populace will need raw materials, which will have to be acquired from the global economy, which will mean the ability to sustain a populace will be based on exports and/or trade from the nation itself.
So after that third generation, what will the global economic fallout be, and what can be done to transition into the UBI?
That's one way to put it, I suppose. What I'm building off of is the implication that for one couple, free shit makes life easier to the tune of the difference of whatever they were making, and $60k. So potentially $20k-$30k easier. I think we could all agree that an extra $20k per year would substantially ease our struggles, potentially getting many of us out of poverty and/or debt. In two years I could have my house paid off, heck at the bare minimum I could afford upkeep on the house I have now, and a $10 per month Netflix subscription!
I find that a bit of mechanical and physical work or processes can bring a balance to a more cerebral work. I find my own IQ level varies based on amount of sleep, diet, exercise, social interaction, and other factors. There are times when some of the tasks are so easy intellectually speaking, that I can have them done in minutes. Other days it might take hours to understand the scope and nature of a similar task, as if I am drugged or half awake. Quite often taking a break and doing something menial provides better results, while still fostering a feeling of being productive. Without a menial labor portion I would have to essentially clock out for a few hours in the middle of a work day, and then return when refreshed.
Those talking about Amazon and Walmart would be Americans, I would expect. I am not under the impression that Canada has a significant presence from those companies in particular. Though, given that Canada would have their own equivalents, and even perhaps a minor presence of either company, the point would be valid.
What confuses me though is the later comment "we are a merit based society". Which I can fully assure that the U.S.A. is not a merit based society. The USA is a capitalist society, not a meritocracy. I've also never heard Canada being referred to as a meritocracy, or otherwise a merit based society.
Which also lends itself to the question of how to measure merit. I thoroughly disagree that capitalism, or profit, is a good discerner of merit.
I also agree with you on point #1, not everybody is trainable for every job. Furthermore, not everybody that is trainable, is trainable to a level of efficiency and mental clarity that is profitable. In this same vein, not everybody is capable of managing a budget to such a fine and visionary degree that they will set themselves up to be billionaires in the future. The blame levied at the poor is likely a symptom of the Dunning-Kruger effect, of overestimating the abilities of the poor, and underestimating the advanced level of their own capabilities.
It seems clear to me that you are trolling. You simply refuse to consider the facts, and concede another's perspective on the matter. Perhaps you are admitting defeat?
Otherwise, what is your rebuttal to the position that those on welfare receive benefits beyond any meager allotment of income which they are given the opportunity to learn how to manage and budget with?
What is your rebuttal on the position that a person on welfare has a guaranteed retirement, and need not budget for retirement or loss of income?
What is your rebuttal on the position that it costs money to compete for raises, and even jobs in the market, and that there is a lot which factors into what kind of salary a person can command?
What is your rebuttal on the position that a person on welfare has more time to spend maintaining their home and vehicle, and other belongings, and has no risk of losing any income from a vehicle that is out of service for repairs? A person on welfare can learn how to fix things, without negatively impacting their employer or their own cashflow. So they don't have to pay somebody else.
Furthermore, being on welfare and not having to afford certain expenses such as daycare, or other such expenses, goes a long way.
A six pack is a coping mechanism. It is a symptom, not a cause. Otherwise a six pack is a peer bonding item, and the peer bonding is what the person values. Community, friendship, camaraderie. Either way, the six pack represents the highlight of an otherwise miserable existence.
No, it was not well thought out, and clearly lacks direct experience in dealing with a wide range of individuals in this matter. Claiming that spending significant amounts on "worthless and harmful" items is the root cause is ignorance.
A lack of hope, or a lack of education and awareness of the costs of various items may be a more appropriate response. Things like cigarettes are addictive. The years of lost savings which are created from just an addiction to cigarettes alone is not readily apparent. So many people believe a $10 per month Netflix subscription is affordable and inexpensive. The low cost of a pack of cigarettes, being it is not a bulk purchase item, hides the high cost of the item from those not sufficiently advanced at budgeting.
Budgetting is a serious art, and a depressing one when you look at a budget and it says it will be 40-70 years before you can retire if you don't go for five years without any "shore leave" or "vacation" or other downtime.
Additionally, what are these individuals working for? What dreams do they have? What motivation? We have provided a template, often referred to as the "American Dream", or "Keeping up with the Jones'". This template may not necessarily be the way to achieving their dreams? How do we help these people figure out what strategy, what tactics, what vision, what kind of life journey leads to what kind of life goals?
I'd like to know how the "working poor" waste "hundreds of dollars every month" or "thousands of dollars every year". I'll have you know a $10 per month Netflix subscription adds (~$100 per year not thousands), adds nearly a decade to amassing replenishment and upkeep costs at a snug poor man's budget. And Netflix is considered to be an inexpensive for of entertainment and relaxation for one's days off, etc.
Poor man's budget:
$300-$500 rent if assisting the landlord with upkeep, $750-$1,000 without.
$1,500 per year automobile upkeep and replacement costs (subtract if trained or apprenticed in auto repair), based on $15,000 minimal replacement cost for a new/like new automobile over a decade.
$50 per month for phone for keeping a job.
$100 per month for auto insurance (Higher costs for insurance given the higher risk of an accident with an uninsured motorist causing a crippling and unrecoverable debt situation.
$100 per month medical coverage can't risk depending on those who don't exist, or who are otherwise similarly lacking in room in their budget.
Plus "Day of Rest" or "shore leave" entertainment expenses to sustain morale over extended periods. (ie. $10 per month Neflix).
Plus taxes and social security, figure about 30%. (I normally factor 40%, and just get a return on the difference at tax time to avoid surprise IRS charges.)
Which creates a baseline starting cost of living of about $3,500 per month. From which investments can reduce that to a more sustainable $1,100 per month if one has capital beyond the $3,500 per month minimum with which to invest in ones self. Given minimum wage is $1,250 per month, is it any surprise that many cannot afford to invest in themselves to lower their cost of living? Of course the variance between $1,100 and $3,500 is going to vary between individual to individual, but $1,250 is only sustainable after a lifetime of experience. The time it takes to get to $1,100 depends on the intellectual capacity of the individual and the money and time available for investing in one's self.
Individuals on welfare are often further subsidized, either by reduced housing costs, free cell phones, or other cost savings, and combined with the increased amount of time to invest in themselves, and the guaranteed income to eliminate the risk of a loss of a job from failures while learning, means that an individual on welfare is in a far greater position to build their skillset than a working person, aside from the lack of exposure to the actual workplace. It is for this reason that I consider anyone on welfare who is not gearing up to become the next Tony Stark, is one who is caught in the welfare trap. Being on welfare one's earning potential is limited to the welfare cap, which often means one must take on additional financial burdens, effectively lowering one's welfare benefit significantly, before exceeding the welfare amount and achieving sustainable financial independence. One must leap from $1,000 per month in expenses, to $4,000 per month in expenses if one is not extremely competent.
Two things: 1. A lawyer, 2. A "training dummy" for debates or other educational pursuits.
If applied to other non-critical, non-life threatening, low risk uses, it can potentially supplant humans in many capacities, such as an I.T. Help Desk. It need not be 100% accurate, just as acccurate as an average human. Being able to fashion a reasonable argument or set of instructions from a trusted dataset is a very useful thing. Though it does take away some of the low risk experience opportunities to develop skills for higher risk situations.
This thing is perhaps most valuable as a "training dummy", to measure ones self against and to improve against.
Not knowledge, however this thing can process vast amounts of knowledge and provide a response which has a very high probability of being correct and/or at the very least relevant, and it can do this in real-time.
If users could follow directions regarding computers, or even have a two-way conversation with this machine, then this thing could take over a third of my duties in I.T. (Handholding, and transliterating). As it stands the machine may reduce my time to research answers, a problem which Google has largely solved.
I suppose this could provide a high level of research to those who need to learn how to research, making them ineffective at their jobs without technology, and unable to accurately access the quality of the technology leading to stagnation and the collapse of modern society.
Deploying this thing in a field of debate shows an effective alternative to reducing the value of intelligence. If we were to capitalize on this for educational and testing purposes, somehow outlawing and blocking its use in commercial environments, it could prove an incredible asset for building a brighter future. We could potentially use this machine to sharpen our brains rather than to dull them.
Near about the same here. 11-12 years or so, nearly 300 titles. Most of the games which don't run on anything newer than XP were added later. With Steam being released so near the release of Windows Vista, and with Vista and Windows 7 being so compatible, any games which were released after Steam went live were likely updated with Windows 7 compatibility.
However, many of the more retro titles may not have gotten the same treatment. Titles originally released in the late 90s, to 2001 or 2002, and some up to 2005, may not work on Windows 7, or if they do they work in limited capacity. I've been running Vista for most of those 12 years, and I've struggled to get several games to run properly on a Vista PC, and I choose my configurations for compatibility more so than performance. I've got one Atari Classics game dumped into an XP Only category, because it only works in Safe Mode on Vista. Most of those problematic titles were probably dumped on Steam before XP was sunset in 2014. Games for Windows Live is a part of the problem for more recent titles though. I'm sure Windows 10 has even more hurdles to overcome to get games working on it, though I haven't tried migrating to Windows 10 for my gaming yet.
Keep in mind, Steam has over 780 million titles, 350 titles is barely a drop in the bucket. If you're going to run into problems they are likely going to happen with titles released during the transition from Windows 9x to Windows XP, and titles with a lot of issues and absolutely no work-arounds or fixes will have likely been pulled from the store (The Atari title was pulled from the Steam Store, another more recent collection has since replaced it).
It was a real nice ride while it lasted. No-CD fixes for titles during the Windows 98 and Windows XP era were popular for a reason. Everybody knew you didn't need the CD-ROM for anything more than licensing validation. Move that licensing validation from the disc to a login and you no longer had to keep track of your CD-ROMs, and CD Keys, and no longer had to worry about scratches. Scratches on frequently played game disc were the bane of a gamer back in the day. Even better it mean you no longer had to keep boxes of discs around, everything became virtual. It was beautiful. With the death of Games for Windows Marketplace, and now the end of XP era support (the first real supported era for Steam), this marks the end of the golden age of Steam.
There is the old world, where items purchased would last as long as you maintained them. A person could provide a very nice living condition over a lifetime. Unsupported merely meant you had to maintain the item yourself.
In the modern 2010+ era, where people don't sell merchandise, but instead they lease services, unsupported means you lose the ability to fix it or even use it. We've been fussing about the right to repair for some time now, and this is part of that same argument.
Windows XP? IOT Devices? The current items are the ISP provided modems which all used the same default credentials, which resulted in the spread of quite a bit of malware. Supposedly a "solved problem", one that the FBI recently had to issue a public statement on.
+1 for LOL
-1 for bad maths...
It means it ends up in the bargain bin for those who are willing to self-support their own software.
For games, yes actually. The games are more important than whatever else the OS used to do. At this point in the OS's existence, the OS serves only as a means of accessing content not compatible with more modern OSes. Favorite games, classics. Games which usually do not require an internet to play, other than for the Steam licensing validation. Good old fashioned LAN games or single player games. Put the old OS with unpatched vulnerabilities behind a firewall on a secure network, or take it completely offline if possible (not possible with Steam).
3D Rendering in a VM takes a hit, and game compatibility is iffy. Any 2D titles will work without issue, but games like Deus Ex, or System Shock, or Star Trek Elite Force II, or X-Wing Alliance, etc. Will likely suffer or not work in a VM.
Even still, if the Steam client doesn't work in XP, inside of the VM, the game won't load either.
In the non-subscription non-software-as-a-service world, unsupported software is simply unsupported. It works the same as it did for the last update. It is essentially frozen in time. In the Software as a Service world, unsupported software is software which stops working. It increases the cost of the purchase because the number of years of usability are limited rather than unlimited (or limited to the life of the hardware).
A game which costs $80 USD retail with DLC, will be limited to a decade or so, or about $10 per year per game. Where as a game disc bought during the XP/Vista era could be had for $40-$50 USD, with no DLC to purchase, and 20-30 years of use, or about $1 per year, per game. Not to mention the added cost of the hardware. Older hardware typically gets less expensive over time to replace, so replenishment costs are reduced from $1,000 to $100 over time, so you can buy more than one piece of hardware. And you will be able to build the collection of titles for that system over time. With the SAAS model you will have to replace the entire collection every so many years, with a potentially substantial part of the collection lost all at once. Additionally, you will need to replace the hardware with new hardware to support the supported titles. So instead of the cost of maintaining an comparable collection of games going down, it will increase over time. Which means your collection of video games is likely to shrink over time.
Offline Mode is only temporary for Steam Clients. I believe the duration is a maximum of two weeks. Valve has promised to release a patch to allow games to be played offline if the Steam Service ever goes down permanently, but this change would not seem to qualify.
Some games on Steam require a 17-year old computer, and will not run on anything newer. This change may result in a large number of games being removed from the Steam Store.
Updating the OS isn't that easy. Updating the OS breaks things, like video games. Effectively 50% of the catalog of games I have purchased will be rendered unplayable because they do not run on anything newer than Windows Vista.
Which means I will have to purchase them again on Good old Games, IF, and that is a big IF, they are available through that service. Where there is any crossover the Steam version typically receives the same or similar treatment and thus is compatible with a modern OS.
I am not a fan of spending a significant portion of my hard earned money to keep up with the Jones's. And I spent my $1,000 allotment for the 2015- 2025 decade on a Surface Pro 4 with specs from a decade prior, the Windows XP/Vista era, and is essentially identical in spec to my Windows Vista entertainment PC.
I work in I.T., and the Surface Pro has become the platform of choice. It was an investment in my ability to support my employer during the transition from traditional PCs to Surface Pro devices.
Sierra had a game called Driver's Ed. Whenever I ran into a cop car in the game, the instructor would exclaim "I'm sure the police would be interested to hear YOUR side of the story,...".
If you can't write it into policy, then your employees can't follow it, implement it, or enforce it. Policy interpretation follows a lowest common denominator theory. Every side with a stake in the implementation will push the interpretation as far as they can get away with.