the customer see’s the PS5 for 600, and the steam machine for 1000+, and assume steam is the one doing something unethical
Do they? I don’t automatically assume there’s anything unethical about the more expensive option in any other product category. The PS5 itself costs more than an XBox Series S, probably not because Microsoft is morally superior to Sony.
I think you said that people who do things like build a cluster of PS3s because they’re a lot of compute for the money are shitty, and that they’re abusing the fact that Sony priced them low in the hope that people who bought them would also buy games. I disagree with that position.
If you meant something else, perhaps we don’t disagree.
Buying things at their retail price and using them in a way the manufacturer didn’t intend is not shitty, nor abuse.
Most of the business models that enable subsidized pricing for consumer products, on the other hand rely on artificially restricting how people can use those products, which is shitty and abusive.
Three states (Louisiana, Texas, Washington) do that. Others don’t.
As to why, the simple answer is the state government made a law. They get to do that because the state constitution says so, and it doesn’t conflict with any federal law. If you keep asking why, you’ll usually end up with a root cause like the people who have power want it that way, or at least don’t especially want it a different way.
The fact that other places do it differently has nothing to do with anything.
I suppose I should clarify that I could write a full-length article about it on something else.
I’ve been running Gnome on a Surface for a while. It’s an outstanding tablet UI except for its onscreen keyboard. The keyboard is terrible. I could write a full-length article about how terrible the keyboard is, but here are a few quick complaints:
So nobody can agree if they’re far-left or far-right, but everyone agrees they’re far-authoritarian?