Because in real life the store clerk won't let a child spend $1000 on their parents card making purchases again and again and again and again and again, but a video game will let a child do it in less than an hour and consider that a success and try to understand how to stimulate another child to do so.
Differ all you want. No child will bankrupt a family at a trading card game store. These are physical goods paid in bulk with provisioning and there are laws for returning them.
Another point of contention is the randomness of packs. The way you play is: You save up to buy the entire set of boosters and already get almost all cards you need for competitive or fun play. The rest you need to trade for or buy individually. It is much more of a social interaction than gambling. The value you get from saving up and trading is easily 10x what you get from opening boosters.
That's why you will never see a bunch of kids queued up in front of a counter frothing from the mouth saying "just... one more!"
Allowing trading is a big part of it. Most online games never allow trading the things bought with real money, they get tied to your account. I guess as a way to prevent CC fraud but it still contributes to the issue.
It's a double-edged sword. For the seller, the ideal would be getting people just as addicted but not allowing trading, since that increases the average spend required to get a specific desired pull substantially.
Trading wouldn't work due to online game deflation. They have to set you up in order to retain you. When you open a new account, or are a "returning player" you get a bunch of free/easy to get stuff that took someone else a decade to collect.
You can't return an opened pack of Pokémon cards and more than you can get your money back for a used lottery ticket. It's absolutely gambling. Low stakes gambling maybe, but it's still gambling.
If you want to allow Pokémon cards and not casinos you have to accept that your rule isn't just "kids can't gamble".
But that is still a strange argument, because IF the argument is that loot boxes are so dangerous and addictive, why can, say, a 19 years old do it but a 18 years old can not? That makes no logical sense. One year is a magical difference suddenly?
This is a bit of a silly argument, given all the precedent in real life for this sort of thing.
Can a 16 year old magically drive a car properly, but a 15 year old can't? Is an 18 year old magically much more capable doing their electoral civic duty than a 17 year old? Is a 21 year old magically able to consume alcohol responsibly, but a 20 year old isn't?
(Or whatever age cutoffs are appropriate for your jurisdiction.)
We define these cutoffs not because they are magical or apply equally to everyone, but because we have to draw the line somewhere, in cases where we aren't going to do a blanket all-ages ban. Sometimes the cutoff is chosen poorly, certainly, but that's a problem with the implementation, not the idea itself.
You implicitly assume that age is a proxy for ability, but that's not the reason for these laws. Age is a proxy for membership in a social class where discrimination is permitted. Otherwise we would prevent people from voting, which Americans did with Literacy/IQ tests and Blacks.
The actual reasons is that they hope to have captured the childs' reward system by then. Laura Cress must write articles for the BBC if she stopped she would lose her purpose in life and be forced into rehab, she would experience ego death and ostracization until she builds another system approved skill. Current society is heading off a demographic collapse due to this built up debt.
The real problem is that we have invented a society that is less rewarding than a slot machine, not that humans are somehow built wrong. A slot machine or hard drug can only effectively hack ones physiology, a social system can hack the whole stack at once (Physiology, Emotions, Ego, Social belonging). You can give bad actors the pains of withdrawal, peril, existential crisis and social suicide all in one. There are examples throughout very recent history of each layer being captured more perfectly. Even physiology more perfectly than any drug, think enclosure act, 14 hour workdays in industrial England.
Fine, ban lootboxes, but don't pretend it's to protect youths, it's to utilize "children". society is a massively harmful and evil tool, we must acknowledge that it's pure unadulterated evil that wouldn't blink at killing all youths. This is a fact, not an opinion, morals are just an API for humans that the system uses.
Not just that, but this assumes that the average 18 years old has the same mental capacity as the others more or less. Bell curves clearly show the opposite
> the promise of the App Store is "pay a 30% tax and any app you download here will be safe."
Apple, who revealed in court that they enjoy a 75% profit margin on that fee, is being sued for that promise being false advertising on account of the crypto scams they keep approving.
Stemming from the case where Apple revealed their 75% profit margin on these fees, Apple was referred for criminal investigation for illegally forcing everyone to pay that fee violating a court order to ensure they get it and then lying to a judge about it.
In practice I think this is going to be very specific to your data being good for compression and not already compressed - so not gaming, where textures can fill up the Neo's 8GB very fast depending on the game: Cyberpunk, Robocop, Bioshock and Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmarks are showing 9 - 10 GB of RAM used at just 720p.
Having completed SotTR on my MacMini M2 8GB, the game plays fluent at 1080p around 40-60fps without any issues. There are youtubers showing Cyberpunk on the Neo on lowest settings running around 50fps. Cyberpunk being somewhat special as it is visually so beautiful, that I would not recommend to complete it on a Neo.
> B) how much money there is to be made having people wear them.
Meta have been desperately searching for “the next big walled garden” for like a decade.
The prize is clear: whatever the next big mass-consumer hardware device is with an app store attached will leech hundreds of billions in fees and enjoy absolute control over everyone building on it.
It's been a very frustrating year, I made the mistake of upgrading Pop OS 22.04 that I'd been using for years that was a rough couple of weeks!
Toshy still works to give me Mac keyboard shortcuts I might never let go of, but I still haven't figured out the keyboard shortcut to switch between open instances of the same program which drives me insane!
> Even ignoring bugs and design changes, in which way does it serve users to phase out Rosetta 2, which in a container-heavy world is more or less required for developers due to the ecosystem of ARM64 Linux containers being nowhere near as widespread as for AMD x86-64 ones, and which keeps many applications runnable that otherwise wouldn't be?
This is what tells me I'm completely misaligned with Apple's vision of the future.
Why would I want an OS that aspires to prevent me from running perfectly good software that runs very well??? And at a time when even smartphones are starting to run x86 software well!
That's literally the opposite of what I want from a computer. If I have to choose between losing Mac software vs losing x86 software it is much easier to leave Mac software behind.
"Preventing users from running the software they want to run" seems like such an anti-feature, yet every major system seems to be moving quickly in this direction. I feel like general purpose computing is going to be on life support, soon.
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