well yes, but it’s profitable because customers continue to buy their products and services.

the problem with blaming companies is none of them do this out of desire to hurt the environment. they do it to meet customer demand.

as an example imagine if we all stopped buying gas from Shell. their environmental impact would plummet…and their competitors impact would go up as we continue to buy the same amount of gas from other companies

as a newcomer i would just suggest getting a USB storage of some kind as they are cheap and the alternatives are not at all easy or obvious.

if you really want to do it without one, you could create a new fat32 partition and install freedos on it and dual boot to that and use that to run the bios updater-- assuming they have one for dos and not only a windows version, otherwise you’d need to do that but with an actual windows install. Modern windows doesn’t require a license so you could just get win10 or 11.

but the act of resizing your disks or trying to reconfigure your bootloader(and especially installing windows) are all things that can easily result in you breaking your Linux install, likely irrecoverably without even more in depth work. so really…only do this if you’re at least okay with the idea of reinstalling Linux and losing all of your data and spending a lot of time learning more than you might want to about how these things work.

so definitely easier to just get a cheap USB drive.

it sounds like you understand the value of using water to clean your butthole after you poop… so why not spend the $30 on a bidet just in case you ever do have a poop and don’t want to shower? or hell just so you don’t use as much TP before hopping in the shower. or for anyone else using your toilet and not wanting to hop in the shower…

there’s also the impact of having less consistency in hours. i.e if I work Friday and don’t work Monday but am blocked waiting for someone whondoesnt work friday…it’s waiting until Tuesday.

would Americans even consider that taking down the internet? It wouldn’t impact a US client talking to a US server.

eh…kinda. the upside to manual USB updates is you get to intentionally apply them and can decide not to if an update makes things worse like removing features or adding more ads and tracking.

with automatic updates they can just silently update without your consent

using pet names, titles, or other things like that are useful in media when you want to convey the relationship.

Like when a movie has a man greet a woman. If he just said ‘hi jill’ you wouldn’t know who she is to him. If he says ‘hey babe’ you assume they’re in a relationship.

So idk what is actually more common in real situations but it’s easy to assume people only use pet names when you’re not going to see anyone’s actual one on one conversations

even just knowing enough to not consider clothes ruined when a button pops out or a tear forms would be nice

Others have pointed out the concerns around negative reviews of things still subject to change, but the other aspect is just the relations with media.

I’m sure tons of journalists have been playing. And probably even working on content covering the game, but not publishing it yet. Once valve is ready for coverage they’ll have polished content ready. And valve can control the timing so that coverage happens right when they want the hype like maybe a few days before an open beta.

By covering it early you encourage other journalists to do the same, rushing out low quality content to get the views before others do. And for valve to not let any journalists see the game early to avoid this.