If Steam goes offline, billions and billions of dollars of games go with it. The online ones, the offline ones, all of it. Gone forever. Some will not function at all without Steam servers.

Steam pioneered remote DRM attestations for PC gaming, remote product key validation, always-online dependencies on Steamworks and more.

I also completely disagree that "it doesn't cost Valve anything to run Half Life". Firstly, it's patently incorrect, given Half Life has received 20+ updates in the last 5 years alone. Secondly, it's technically incorrect, given Steam going offline prevents you from opening Half Life at all. Newsflash, Steam games have CEG DRM and will not function for long periods of time without Steam.

Steam shuts down tomorrow, guess what? None of your games are working without a third party workaround. Even if you had them installed.

At no point did you purchase unlimited free online service forever, by the way. The game developer did not promise that, and you hold no contract with them mandating free labor and infrastructure perpetually.

It's the equivalent of paying $10 to enter an all-you-can-eat restaurant and complaining when they kick you out at 10pm while you say that you haven't technically had ALL you can eat yet.

Not to mention the load constraints did not grow 7x, it's orders of magnitude more load increase than that.

As the world's mobile data speeds have skyrocketed in speeds and plummeted in price, WhatsApp is now handling orders of magnitude more data per user than when they served merely 450. And it's all complicated rich media which was not handled at the time.

WhatsApp's file limit at the time of acquisition was 16 MB. Today, it's 2 GB. Per file. It didn't have voice or video calling at acquisition either, also highly complex and expensive to run.

WhatsApp grew 7x in user base, but the scale of data and technical complexity grew exponentially more.

If this were so easy, history would not be littered with high profile scaling failures from messaging apps. Most notably Signal, which couldn't handle a 1.5x influx of users from WhatsApp and was down for weeks.

Claiming a 7x scale is technically easy while your data-per-user growth grows probably 50% a year or more is patently ridiculous.

Seems like an insane achievement to scale a messaging service to half of the world.

Working is objectively good for your health. Stopping work is associated with an extremely large increase in mortality risk, for both healthy and unhealthy people.

Any alternatives must weigh the resulting death it will cause.

Didn't an EPA whistleblower credibly accuse the fully regulated EPA of a coverup including backdated policies in that incident?

Sounds like a better system, coverups, corruption and incompetence.

Notably, the exact same UK visa you used has been made substantially harder to get since you applied.

I am very familiar with the US, UK and Australian immigration systems. The US is the easiest, cheapest and fastest of those 3.

Notably, and very relevant, the UK recently made it substantially harder for UK citizens to bring over spouses to the point that even teachers don't meet the income thresholds necessary to qualify.

Australia is more expensive AND takes longer than the United States for the equivalent spousal visa.

Seems extremely clear to me.

https://fam.state.gov/fam/09FAM/09FAM040213.html#M402_13_5_B

https://www.businessinsider.com/new-green-card-rule-wont-aff...

https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/memos/PM-...

H1Bs should jump the queue why? You're arguing that the family of US Citizens should be considered behind temporary immigrant workers with no family ties to the United States, and you should be exempt from the requirements they face.