That didn’t take long.

I don’t fully disagree with you. I personally don’t pirate things (I can afford to just pay up front, and if I don’t want to support a dev, I just fully don’t play the game, I don’t want to accidentally be lumped into any metrics that might show support), but the game dev themselves said “No skin off our back”.

If I steal your car, you no longer have a car. If I steal your game, you’ve lost absolutely nothing. Code is infinitely reproducible. You’re only out the sale.

This dev made art, and they care more about sharing the art they created with more people, than they do about getting every last transaction paid for.

It’s usually the publisher that has strong opinions about this, because they didn’t make the art nor do they care about people seeing it. they only care about getting the money, but again, if you can’t afford it, they were never going to get your money anyway. It’s technically a victimless crime. No skin off anyone’s back.

The issue is when enough people who CAN afford to pay use the “no skin off their back” logic to not pay, and a good game winds up not being profitable (or profitable enough to the publisher) and a studio suffers as a result.

Also if the alternative was “no money, still can’t buy the game” then they are losing no money in the process anyway.

I have a few cheap TLDs because as an individual I didn’t want to pay a lot of money for the dot com versions. But I’m not a company.

In pineapple express they call it “the dopest dope I ever smoked”… But I now realize that movie is almost 20 years old.

What exactly? That they’re moving to zero hour contracts

This isnt what the headline says though. “Discovered zero hour contracts” isnt how normal people speak. I have no clue if a mass teams call means they discovered some people were already on contracts, or that they were moving everyone to them, or some people, or (not knowing what a zero hour contract is) that the company has new contracts with game publishers.

You took your own understanding of the headline and even in your “its simple” added details that weren’t there originally.

Sorry, my phrasing of “not how it works” is more about willingness from the lender side and not “allowed” to. He couldn’t even get a bond for for the reduced amount without going through a shady company. He’s certainly not going to get 4 bonds.

use two or three surety companies, each taking, let’s say, a $50 or $75 million piece to total up to $175 million.

Even with split up bonds to reduce risk in a normal situation, the bonding company is going to assess risk based on the full cost of the bond. They personally only have to put up less money, so the “how much do i lose if everything goes wrong” scenario is less, but “how likely is it something goes wrong” involves “the person on trial for lying about finances doesn’t actually have enough to cover the full bond, so perhaps that increases the odds of me getting my money back”

Why would you throw away $50 million dollars. It’s “less risk” only because it’s less money. But if you think he’s shady enough that likely you never see the money again, then why put up any money, especially if you have to compete with others to get the payout.

If someone said “You can gamble $50 million or $400 million. If you win you get 5%, but the odds of winning are only 10%, and if you lose you only get back $10 million.” You would obviously opt to gamble the $50 million. You want to lose less money. The payout isn’t worth it given the odds. If you were then told “oh, you can just opt out and avoid the dumpster fire of a deal”, you are going to choose to opt out. No amount of “it’s less risk” will make this a good deal for a bonding company.

So yes, syndicating the bond is an option, no smart bonding company is going to touch this, which means even with syndicating it will be hard for him to find enough incompetent, shady, unlicensed bonding companies.

And to be clear, this is not me arguing in favor of why any amount of money was unfair to expect Trump to acquire. This is me pointing out why he’s never going to get the money from legit sources because he’s a financial dumpster fire, and they should just throw the book at him instead of continuously going easy on him.

edit:

But with Donald Trump bragging that he has $500 million cash in the bank, combined with the other assets we know he has in real estate

Trump bragging about made up numbers don’t make anyone more confident about his assets. Both the value of his assets and how much stake in those assets is actually his is a thing he notoriously lies about. He’s even been found guilty about lying about his finances I think.

If he actually had that money money just in the bank, none of this would be an issue, but the thing is… it’s not true.

That’s valid, but even then, a $120m bond is less risk that 4x companies supplying $120m bonds. When the time comes to pay out and you need to get your collateral, if there is only $150m available to actually pay out, you get yours, vs having to split it multiple ways, or otherwise not getting a payout at all.

And that’s assuming you can get 4x companies to even throw in $120m. He is so unreliable that had to get an unlicensed company to even get that much, so I doubt he’s going to find 4x legit companies to team up.

But then again, requiring the full amount should still just be enforced. If no one wants to provide bond, thats his problem, not the court’s. I certainly don’t get to say “Well I can’t get bond” and get to have the amount lowered. If I say that, I just don’t get to appeal.

Thats not how loans necessarily work though. If I go to a bank and ask for $100m, but they see I already owe $350m to other lenders, they’ll say no, because they know they arent getting paid back until after the other 3. So if they think trump has $450m in assets, just give him whole amount, and if they don’t think he has that much, any money theyre giving him is just being thrown away.

This is a guy notorious for lying about his assets and not paying debts. Even giving him $125m is a bad idea, but the odds of getting paid back get even worse if you arent first in line.

Its enough for me too. But not everyone has the same use case and environment. I definitely see why someone would want this.

What I disagree with is that it needs to communicate to the internet to do this. It adds delay and potential for outage if your internet is out. But they do this so they can force you to get their app and milk you for extra data to sell. Internet capable smart devices are to harvest data not grant features. Features could be done better by ZigBee and a hub, but that doesnt grant the device a way to phone home

Oh good, if that is all true, you wont have to change anything to be compliant with new laws and should have no issue with them.

Hopefully. The thing about social platforms is that if everyone else leaves and doesnt tell them to fuck right off, it can get lonely. Xmpp still exists and im sure some people use it successfully, but its definitely not the same scale it once was