They wouldn't have run in there to save the animals even if Crannick was a fully paid subscriber. Firemen don't enter burning buildings just to save pets.
Besides, there was a couple hours between the shed catching fire and the house. All Crannick had to do to save his pets was, you know, open the fucking door.
They refused to allow him to pay the $75 then and there because $75 is the insurance premium. It only meaningfully covers the cost when it's collected over years when your house doesn't burn down.
So charge the actual costs? In the past, the South Fulton Fire Department collected less than 50% of the time when someone offered to pay actual, and because it's county residents outside the municipality's jurisdiction, the city has no legal means to force payment like a lien on the house.
The guy offered to pay (he claimed that he forgot about the fee, who hasn't missed a bill payment once in their life?)
He was lying. He said that three days later on Olbermann. What he said immediately after the fire to a local reporter was "I thought they'd come out and put it out, even if you hadn't paid your $75". He was explicitly and consciously being a freeloader.
In previous cases of billing the non-subscriber afterwards, the South Fulton FD collects less than 50% of the time.
The FD is a municipal organization; the non-subscribers are county residents. The municipality has no legal means to coerce payment if the non-subscriber won't write a check afterwards, besides simply suing the houseowner, which would cost far more than they would get.
Basically, when one of them calls up and says "I'll pay anything!", he usually doesn't mean it, and often can't. Planning to bill them afterwards is how the FD is $30k in the hole servicing the county residents.
All the GGs are just pretty faces. The post has been ceremonial basically since the British North America Act of 1867 and then the Statute of Westminster in 1931, and certainly since Trudeau patriated the constitution in 1982. Since the BNA, it's the prime minister who runs the country.
Michelle Jean having the opportunity to screw Harper was about Harper gaming the system, not any sort of normal authority the GG carries and exercises.
In Frank Herbert's books set in the Dosadi universe (Whipping Star and The Dosadi Experiment), this is exactly the premise: That government became hyper-efficient and thus, tyrannical, so a rebellion was formed to slow the workings of government. When they were successful, it was recognized that they served a needed purpose, so the Bureau of Sabotage was created to slow the workings of government, to keep it at a human pace. The protagonist, Jorj X. McKie, has the position, and the most awesome job title ever, of saboteur extraordinary.
Here's a sophisticated argument: You're an ignoramus who needs to RTFA.
The signs are being replaced as part of their normal replacement schedule to due to wear. They'd spend the $27.5 million regardless, unless you're in favor of more drivers squinting at worn out signs. The only difference is that, in this round of replacements, they're going to use lowercase letters that are more easily read, which brings them into line with the federal standard.
Here's an idea: You RTFA. That's exactly how they're doing it, as part of their normal replacement schedule and with money long ago allocated for normal replacement of street signs.
The opposite. From afar, before everything is perfectly distinguishable, lower case is easier to read because part of how our brain processes words is by their overall shape. There was a study a couple years ago linked here demonstrating that people could quite easily read text where all the middle letters of a word in lower case were randomly mixed up, because word shape (i.e., length and the number of ascenders and descenders) was a significant part of recognizing words.
When an iDevice app tries to read your location, it requires your permission to access that data. That's enforced by iOS, it's not an honor thing. The first time it tries to do so, iOS pops an alert saying "this app wants to access your location. Allow/Deny".
in my opinion anyone willing to pay for your app on a closed platform would most likely be willing to do so on any platform; those unwilling to do so would just go without.
I don't believe this because I believe there's a significant segment who would normally pay for an app, but don't on a platform like Android because it's not just possible but easy to get it for free. Once you know how to download movies, how often do you go to the video store? Put another way, it's possible to jailbreak your iPhone and so use pirated apps, but it's not (usually) easy, so a lot of people don't. Jailbroken iDevices count for less than 9% of the 80 million that are out there.
Sure, charging anything at all reduces the number who will use your app. But there's a middle ground between "I'll happily pay for the app" and "I won't bother if it's not free": that middle ground is "I would pay for it, but why should I when it's for free over here? I'll install it and if I like it, think about tossing the dev a buck for it, and then forget to toss the buck."
As the GP stated, all that really matters is the revenue you can reasonably expect from a given platform,
Agreed, but my point is that my likelihood of receiving revenue is higher on the platform where piracy is harder. I've seen no one plausibly suggest that Android sales of my app would be higher than iPhone sales, so the obvious choice for me is iPhone.
The only downside to porting the software would be the risk that the port could cannibalize sales on other platforms, which is unlikely unless many of your potential customers already own multiple devices.
This is a collective action problem for developers. If I'm choosing which device to buy, and I see that one clearly has superior apps than the other, I'm going to choose the one with better apps. If the same app is available for money on the iPhone and easily pirated on Android, then I'll likely choose Android, so as a mobile dev, my interest lies in not porting to Android because that does lead to a degree of cannibalizing my own paying market.
If my bank locks the vault with only a pad lock... I sure don't blame the burglar when my money goes missing.
Really? I would. Theft is illegal.
In France, some thieves have found a way to drill holes into buildings and vaults and vacuum out the contents. Points to them for cleverness. By your definition, the bank did not sufficiently protect the money, therefore the blame is all on them, and not the thieves? By your definition, all a thief has to do is succeed in stealing something, and they're blameless, because by your definition the victim's failure to prevent the thief from succeeding makes them entirely culpable.
In response to your analogy: No... I would not mind if someone came into my open house and copied my television. Only the television company would care about this and would incorrectly claim this as lost revenue.
If we want the analogy to go that far, then you should be the TV company, who actually is losing revenue in some portion of cases of copying. It's not true that every pirate would pay if they couldn't pirate, but it's likewise untrue that no pirate would ever pay. There's a squishy middle of people who pirate when it's convenient and pay when it's not. If there are X pirated copies, then there's some fraction of X that is, in fact, lost revenue because of copying.
There is great value in sharing software.
There is some value in sharing, I agree. The value of piracy is more widespread distribution.
The system that provides the most open sharing (aka: currently Android) will provide the most value.
I don't understand what this means. Value to whom? To the developers? I find that very doubtful. On iDevices, the squishy middle pays for their apps, which they pirate on Android. To users? Possibly, except that the app marketplace for iDevice apps is far better because compensated developers are building better apps there because it's a relatively secure channel.
It is the responsibility of the company who retains proprietary code to keep this code from becoming public knowledge and entering the shared software stream.
And yet every attempt to protect proprietary code is met with cries of "jackbooted facism!" from the people here, who refuse to pay on principle and use that as a justification for cracking the software. And by your definition above, all they need to do to justify it is success, since that means the company failed in its responsibility.
You're putting developers in a double bind here: You're telling them to release their code for free, or to try to protect and in so doing justify the piracy of it. All without demonstrating that there's greater value on that path.
We cannot legislate security... either dictated to us by the operating system maker (apple) or by law (dmca).
Apple is successfully demonstrating that we can legislate security--not perfectly, but sufficiently to maintain a marketplace that developers choose over other marketplaces because the likelihood of compensation is higher.
You're correct that the important number is the number of paying customers. I don't see why I should think that I'll have a higher number of paying customers on Android. iDevices are widespread, there's a culture of "if you want it, you pay for it" (less than 9% of iDevices are jailbroken), and the perceived level of quality of apps in the app store, compared to Android, means that paying is more likely.
A large part of the problem with Android is that it now has a culture where paying is for suckers. Not every pirate will pay if they can't pirate, but there's a squishy middle who will pirate if they can and pay if they can't. I don't see why I should surrender that squishy middle block of customers--which is to say, I don't see that the benefit of wider distribution from piracy overcoming the loss that squishy middle.
It's absolute myth that stopping piracy turns the other 5000 pirated copies into sales. It just doesn't work that way.
It's also a myth that if pirates are prevented, they won't ever pay. Somewhere between 0 and 5,000 users will pay for it, and if the choice is between having and not having those extra payers, I'll take having them.
But more than that, the iPhone has created a certain culture where piracy is possible but unusual--less than 9% of iPhones are jailbroken, which is required for pirated apps. For the most part, people with iPhones start from the perspective of having to pay for what they play. On the Android, the culture is that paying is for suckers or the exceptionally morally upright. The wobbly middle cases will pay on the iPhone and pirate on the Android, which means more revenue for the iPhone dev.
As a mobile developer, it's certainly not meaningless to me because when I look at the possibility of recouping my costs, I can choose between a channel where piracy is a very minor concern (iDevices), so I can expect most of my installs to pay me, or Android where few will pay me. It's not the deciding factor, but it is a significant factor because if I expect 10,000 installs, one will get me $9,900 in revenue and the other only $3,000.
This is the problem with piracy on the Android: It's keeping a lot of devs away in favour of the closed channel.
So when I stole your TV because you forgot to lock your door while you were out (or didn't put an unpickable lock on it), you were gifting it to society by failing to properly secure it?
And think back to the Civ V thread last week, and the amount of GRAR around the use of Steam and requiring online activation as the most onerous and useless form of DRM possible.
I use firefox and chrome on my PC, and firefox and safari on mac. I also test in ie. When you use multiple browsers, it's convenient to have the usual bookmarks available on them.
Okay, I'll spell it out for you: They all cost money, and they're all for entertainment purposes, so it's easy to do a cost comparison between them by figuring out the per hour rate for enjoying them.
The complaints of the anti-DRM crowd amount to the fact that you're risking losing something you paid for, through no fault of your own, because you're not allowed to "buy" it, only "rent" it.
My point is that, given the amount of time you can easily play the game long before there's any real risk of not being able to play it anymore, the per hour cost is ridiculously low compared to a lot of other forms of entertainment. When you see a movie in a theater or rent it from the video store, you're done after two hours--you don't have the ability to see it over again without paying again--yet people don't complain even though their per hour cost is much higher than it would be for Civ V.
Even if you bought Civ V knowing it would go dead after a year, you could still easily get a couple hundred hours out of it (I've already put in 39), paying around $0.25/hour, and it would be a far cheaper way to entertain yourself than almost anything else that you already spend money on for entertainment.
This is why the anti-DRM arguments sound so silly: you're taking a principled stand over something that's incredibly cheap, all things considered. Even if you were explicitly renting it, it's still worth paying $50 for a couple of years of playing.
I cant see the iPhone living too long with such ill-conceived (dis)funcionallity.
And yet over 33 million iPhones have been sold to date. The iPad is closing in on 6 million sold. iTouches outnumber both. So conservatively, better than 80 million devices have been sold for which the app store is a reliable and reasonably secure facility through which to sell your apps.
You're right, the whole thing is just a fad. No sense spending $60 on a programming book for it.
Then if you actually play the game a bunch, you'll have more than recouped the $50 you spent.
Seriously, if you enjoy playing the game, you'll easily put in 100-200 hours playing it over the couple years when you're pretty much guaranteed that Steam won't go tits up. That makes the cost per hour of entertainment less than $0.50. Compare that to other forms of entertainment:
Go to a movie: $6/hour. Eat at a restaurant: $20/hour. Play golf: $15/hour. Cable TV: $0.50-$1/hour. Rent a movie: $2/hour.
I understand disliking DRM on principle. I don't understand the complete failure of a bunch of people here to grasp that, even if their worst DRM nightmare comes true, it's still cheaper to buy the game and play it while you have it than to do basically anything else.
You're cutting off your nose to spite your face. You're avoiding a really enjoyable game to avoid the possibility that in several years you might get screwed by the DRM. On a straight cost/benefit analysis, it's probably worthy buying it even if you know that it's going to not work in a couple years.
Sure, and Civ V definitely falls into that play-over-years category. What you need to judge when you buy over Steam is the relative risk of the game disappearing vs. the money you spend. My point was that you are risking it not being available in 10 years, but if you play it as little as 50 hours (which is trivial where Civ games are concerned), then you're easily getting your money's worth, compared to other forms of entertainment, even if it does disappear.
The price of protecting yourself against disappointment a decade in the future is avoiding all the enjoyment you would probably get out of the game now. That's fucked up economics.
These seem like really silly arguments insofar as the risk of their potential is small, and you'll almost certainly be done with the game long before any of them happen.
Look at it in terms of dollars spent per hours of entertainment. A movie in the theater costs around $6/hour; renting it is $2/hour. A nice meal in a restaurant is around $20/hour. Going skiing for the day? Easily over $20/hour, depending.
So if you buy Civ V, play it for fifty hours, and then lose it in a Steam implosion, you've payed about $1/hour for entertainment. Since you can be pretty confident that Steam's going nowhere in the next year, it's a pretty safe investment in some entertainment, even if you can't play it again in 2020.
> I'm entirely opposed to government market intervention
So if you were American, and the U.S. gov't said "here is a plan to provide higher quality health care than we have now, to every American, at 55% of the cost we currently pay", you'd oppose that.
This is not to denigrate your libertarian beliefs, or your feelings about UHC. Rather, it's a very neat illustration of the problem. Everyone in America could have high quality health care at a much reduced collective price. This is a solved problem. It's been demonstrated to work elsewhere over decades. Yet you would oppose its implementation for philosophical reasons. The better world that you see is radically different from the better world I see, and neither of us are spiteful or malicious in our beliefs. We both sincerely believe that we should all go in the same direction, but the directions we choose are opposite.
This is why I jest. This is why I think we don't have collective control over our fate. These well-meaning differences are mutually exclusive. We can't possibly all agree to either have UHC or all leave the cities and start telecommuting.
Good for you for inventing technologies that lead to a better world. I hope you're successful.
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They wouldn't have run in there to save the animals even if Crannick was a fully paid subscriber. Firemen don't enter burning buildings just to save pets.
Besides, there was a couple hours between the shed catching fire and the house. All Crannick had to do to save his pets was, you know, open the fucking door.
They refused to allow him to pay the $75 then and there because $75 is the insurance premium. It only meaningfully covers the cost when it's collected over years when your house doesn't burn down.
So charge the actual costs? In the past, the South Fulton Fire Department collected less than 50% of the time when someone offered to pay actual, and because it's county residents outside the municipality's jurisdiction, the city has no legal means to force payment like a lien on the house.
The guy offered to pay (he claimed that he forgot about the fee, who hasn't missed a bill payment once in their life?)
He was lying. He said that three days later on Olbermann. What he said immediately after the fire to a local reporter was "I thought they'd come out and put it out, even if you hadn't paid your $75". He was explicitly and consciously being a freeloader.
In previous cases of billing the non-subscriber afterwards, the South Fulton FD collects less than 50% of the time.
The FD is a municipal organization; the non-subscribers are county residents. The municipality has no legal means to coerce payment if the non-subscriber won't write a check afterwards, besides simply suing the houseowner, which would cost far more than they would get.
Basically, when one of them calls up and says "I'll pay anything!", he usually doesn't mean it, and often can't. Planning to bill them afterwards is how the FD is $30k in the hole servicing the county residents.
All the GGs are just pretty faces. The post has been ceremonial basically since the British North America Act of 1867 and then the Statute of Westminster in 1931, and certainly since Trudeau patriated the constitution in 1982. Since the BNA, it's the prime minister who runs the country.
Michelle Jean having the opportunity to screw Harper was about Harper gaming the system, not any sort of normal authority the GG carries and exercises.
In Frank Herbert's books set in the Dosadi universe (Whipping Star and The Dosadi Experiment), this is exactly the premise: That government became hyper-efficient and thus, tyrannical, so a rebellion was formed to slow the workings of government. When they were successful, it was recognized that they served a needed purpose, so the Bureau of Sabotage was created to slow the workings of government, to keep it at a human pace. The protagonist, Jorj X. McKie, has the position, and the most awesome job title ever, of saboteur extraordinary.
Here's a sophisticated argument: You're an ignoramus who needs to RTFA.
The signs are being replaced as part of their normal replacement schedule to due to wear. They'd spend the $27.5 million regardless, unless you're in favor of more drivers squinting at worn out signs. The only difference is that, in this round of replacements, they're going to use lowercase letters that are more easily read, which brings them into line with the federal standard.
Here's an idea: You RTFA. That's exactly how they're doing it, as part of their normal replacement schedule and with money long ago allocated for normal replacement of street signs.
The opposite. From afar, before everything is perfectly distinguishable, lower case is easier to read because part of how our brain processes words is by their overall shape. There was a study a couple years ago linked here demonstrating that people could quite easily read text where all the middle letters of a word in lower case were randomly mixed up, because word shape (i.e., length and the number of ascenders and descenders) was a significant part of recognizing words.
I haven't seen it myself, but I'm pretty sure that accessing the system address book requires the same alert and explicit permission.
When an iDevice app tries to read your location, it requires your permission to access that data. That's enforced by iOS, it's not an honor thing. The first time it tries to do so, iOS pops an alert saying "this app wants to access your location. Allow/Deny".
in my opinion anyone willing to pay for your app on a closed platform would most likely be willing to do so on any platform; those unwilling to do so would just go without.
I don't believe this because I believe there's a significant segment who would normally pay for an app, but don't on a platform like Android because it's not just possible but easy to get it for free. Once you know how to download movies, how often do you go to the video store? Put another way, it's possible to jailbreak your iPhone and so use pirated apps, but it's not (usually) easy, so a lot of people don't. Jailbroken iDevices count for less than 9% of the 80 million that are out there.
Sure, charging anything at all reduces the number who will use your app. But there's a middle ground between "I'll happily pay for the app" and "I won't bother if it's not free": that middle ground is "I would pay for it, but why should I when it's for free over here? I'll install it and if I like it, think about tossing the dev a buck for it, and then forget to toss the buck."
As the GP stated, all that really matters is the revenue you can reasonably expect from a given platform,
Agreed, but my point is that my likelihood of receiving revenue is higher on the platform where piracy is harder. I've seen no one plausibly suggest that Android sales of my app would be higher than iPhone sales, so the obvious choice for me is iPhone.
The only downside to porting the software would be the risk that the port could cannibalize sales on other platforms, which is unlikely unless many of your potential customers already own multiple devices.
This is a collective action problem for developers. If I'm choosing which device to buy, and I see that one clearly has superior apps than the other, I'm going to choose the one with better apps. If the same app is available for money on the iPhone and easily pirated on Android, then I'll likely choose Android, so as a mobile dev, my interest lies in not porting to Android because that does lead to a degree of cannibalizing my own paying market.
If my bank locks the vault with only a pad lock... I sure don't blame the burglar when my money goes missing.
Really? I would. Theft is illegal.
In France, some thieves have found a way to drill holes into buildings and vaults and vacuum out the contents. Points to them for cleverness. By your definition, the bank did not sufficiently protect the money, therefore the blame is all on them, and not the thieves? By your definition, all a thief has to do is succeed in stealing something, and they're blameless, because by your definition the victim's failure to prevent the thief from succeeding makes them entirely culpable.
In response to your analogy: No... I would not mind if someone came into my open house and copied my television. Only the television company would care about this and would incorrectly claim this as lost revenue.
If we want the analogy to go that far, then you should be the TV company, who actually is losing revenue in some portion of cases of copying. It's not true that every pirate would pay if they couldn't pirate, but it's likewise untrue that no pirate would ever pay. There's a squishy middle of people who pirate when it's convenient and pay when it's not. If there are X pirated copies, then there's some fraction of X that is, in fact, lost revenue because of copying.
There is great value in sharing software.
There is some value in sharing, I agree. The value of piracy is more widespread distribution.
The system that provides the most open sharing (aka: currently Android) will provide the most value.
I don't understand what this means. Value to whom? To the developers? I find that very doubtful. On iDevices, the squishy middle pays for their apps, which they pirate on Android. To users? Possibly, except that the app marketplace for iDevice apps is far better because compensated developers are building better apps there because it's a relatively secure channel.
It is the responsibility of the company who retains proprietary code to keep this code from becoming public knowledge and entering the shared software stream.
And yet every attempt to protect proprietary code is met with cries of "jackbooted facism!" from the people here, who refuse to pay on principle and use that as a justification for cracking the software. And by your definition above, all they need to do to justify it is success, since that means the company failed in its responsibility.
You're putting developers in a double bind here: You're telling them to release their code for free, or to try to protect and in so doing justify the piracy of it. All without demonstrating that there's greater value on that path.
We cannot legislate security... either dictated to us by the operating system maker (apple) or by law (dmca).
Apple is successfully demonstrating that we can legislate security--not perfectly, but sufficiently to maintain a marketplace that developers choose over other marketplaces because the likelihood of compensation is higher.
You're correct that the important number is the number of paying customers. I don't see why I should think that I'll have a higher number of paying customers on Android. iDevices are widespread, there's a culture of "if you want it, you pay for it" (less than 9% of iDevices are jailbroken), and the perceived level of quality of apps in the app store, compared to Android, means that paying is more likely.
A large part of the problem with Android is that it now has a culture where paying is for suckers. Not every pirate will pay if they can't pirate, but there's a squishy middle who will pirate if they can and pay if they can't. I don't see why I should surrender that squishy middle block of customers--which is to say, I don't see that the benefit of wider distribution from piracy overcoming the loss that squishy middle.
It's absolute myth that stopping piracy turns the other 5000 pirated copies into sales. It just doesn't work that way.
It's also a myth that if pirates are prevented, they won't ever pay. Somewhere between 0 and 5,000 users will pay for it, and if the choice is between having and not having those extra payers, I'll take having them.
But more than that, the iPhone has created a certain culture where piracy is possible but unusual--less than 9% of iPhones are jailbroken, which is required for pirated apps. For the most part, people with iPhones start from the perspective of having to pay for what they play. On the Android, the culture is that paying is for suckers or the exceptionally morally upright. The wobbly middle cases will pay on the iPhone and pirate on the Android, which means more revenue for the iPhone dev.
As a mobile developer, it's certainly not meaningless to me because when I look at the possibility of recouping my costs, I can choose between a channel where piracy is a very minor concern (iDevices), so I can expect most of my installs to pay me, or Android where few will pay me. It's not the deciding factor, but it is a significant factor because if I expect 10,000 installs, one will get me $9,900 in revenue and the other only $3,000.
This is the problem with piracy on the Android: It's keeping a lot of devs away in favour of the closed channel.
It's not rampant on the iPhone. It exists, but it's minor.
So when I stole your TV because you forgot to lock your door while you were out (or didn't put an unpickable lock on it), you were gifting it to society by failing to properly secure it?
And think back to the Civ V thread last week, and the amount of GRAR around the use of Steam and requiring online activation as the most onerous and useless form of DRM possible.
I use firefox and chrome on my PC, and firefox and safari on mac. I also test in ie. When you use multiple browsers, it's convenient to have the usual bookmarks available on them.
Okay, I'll spell it out for you: They all cost money, and they're all for entertainment purposes, so it's easy to do a cost comparison between them by figuring out the per hour rate for enjoying them.
The complaints of the anti-DRM crowd amount to the fact that you're risking losing something you paid for, through no fault of your own, because you're not allowed to "buy" it, only "rent" it.
My point is that, given the amount of time you can easily play the game long before there's any real risk of not being able to play it anymore, the per hour cost is ridiculously low compared to a lot of other forms of entertainment. When you see a movie in a theater or rent it from the video store, you're done after two hours--you don't have the ability to see it over again without paying again--yet people don't complain even though their per hour cost is much higher than it would be for Civ V.
Even if you bought Civ V knowing it would go dead after a year, you could still easily get a couple hundred hours out of it (I've already put in 39), paying around $0.25/hour, and it would be a far cheaper way to entertain yourself than almost anything else that you already spend money on for entertainment.
This is why the anti-DRM arguments sound so silly: you're taking a principled stand over something that's incredibly cheap, all things considered. Even if you were explicitly renting it, it's still worth paying $50 for a couple of years of playing.
I cant see the iPhone living too long with such ill-conceived (dis)funcionallity.
And yet over 33 million iPhones have been sold to date. The iPad is closing in on 6 million sold. iTouches outnumber both. So conservatively, better than 80 million devices have been sold for which the app store is a reliable and reasonably secure facility through which to sell your apps.
You're right, the whole thing is just a fad. No sense spending $60 on a programming book for it.
Then if you actually play the game a bunch, you'll have more than recouped the $50 you spent.
Seriously, if you enjoy playing the game, you'll easily put in 100-200 hours playing it over the couple years when you're pretty much guaranteed that Steam won't go tits up. That makes the cost per hour of entertainment less than $0.50. Compare that to other forms of entertainment:
Go to a movie: $6/hour.
Eat at a restaurant: $20/hour.
Play golf: $15/hour.
Cable TV: $0.50-$1/hour.
Rent a movie: $2/hour.
I understand disliking DRM on principle. I don't understand the complete failure of a bunch of people here to grasp that, even if their worst DRM nightmare comes true, it's still cheaper to buy the game and play it while you have it than to do basically anything else.
You're cutting off your nose to spite your face. You're avoiding a really enjoyable game to avoid the possibility that in several years you might get screwed by the DRM. On a straight cost/benefit analysis, it's probably worthy buying it even if you know that it's going to not work in a couple years.
Sure, and Civ V definitely falls into that play-over-years category. What you need to judge when you buy over Steam is the relative risk of the game disappearing vs. the money you spend. My point was that you are risking it not being available in 10 years, but if you play it as little as 50 hours (which is trivial where Civ games are concerned), then you're easily getting your money's worth, compared to other forms of entertainment, even if it does disappear.
The price of protecting yourself against disappointment a decade in the future is avoiding all the enjoyment you would probably get out of the game now. That's fucked up economics.
These seem like really silly arguments insofar as the risk of their potential is small, and you'll almost certainly be done with the game long before any of them happen.
Look at it in terms of dollars spent per hours of entertainment. A movie in the theater costs around $6/hour; renting it is $2/hour. A nice meal in a restaurant is around $20/hour. Going skiing for the day? Easily over $20/hour, depending.
So if you buy Civ V, play it for fifty hours, and then lose it in a Steam implosion, you've payed about $1/hour for entertainment. Since you can be pretty confident that Steam's going nowhere in the next year, it's a pretty safe investment in some entertainment, even if you can't play it again in 2020.
> I'm entirely opposed to government market intervention
So if you were American, and the U.S. gov't said "here is a plan to provide higher quality health care than we have now, to every American, at 55% of the cost we currently pay", you'd oppose that.
This is not to denigrate your libertarian beliefs, or your feelings about UHC. Rather, it's a very neat illustration of the problem. Everyone in America could have high quality health care at a much reduced collective price. This is a solved problem. It's been demonstrated to work elsewhere over decades. Yet you would oppose its implementation for philosophical reasons. The better world that you see is radically different from the better world I see, and neither of us are spiteful or malicious in our beliefs. We both sincerely believe that we should all go in the same direction, but the directions we choose are opposite.
This is why I jest. This is why I think we don't have collective control over our fate. These well-meaning differences are mutually exclusive. We can't possibly all agree to either have UHC or all leave the cities and start telecommuting.
Good for you for inventing technologies that lead to a better world. I hope you're successful.