That said, I'm surprised there's no market for travel routers that VPN back to home whether for personal travel or for college students.

I’m not. It is a hard value proposition to describe, and not an easy product to set up (I mean as a software product, “make sure the server is on a device you never power off and stays at home...” -- if you make a hardware product it won;t be too hard, one device you leave at home and another you take with you...), if you make it a hardware product it is less difficult to set up, but it is going to cost more. If you make it out of say a pair of RPis it is going to run $70 to more. So “save $17 (a month) by paying $70” is a hard sell. Partly because people aren’t long term thinkers (4+ month payoff is a “long time” to many people), and partly because people have bought things that don’t turn out and they trust things like this less, maybe it appears to work for a few weeks and they spend the $70 and it stops working halfway to the 4 months and they lose out.

It isn’t intuitively obvious to people that a VPN is a fundamental solution to the problem, it is more fancy technical crap. So the people that will trust this product to be a “real answer” aren’t all that numerous, and of those that know a VPM is basically the answer the majority of them know how to set one up already. So the real market is the vanishingly small number of people that know they want a VPN and also don’t know how to set one up already. (to be clear I think it is a fine solution, but you face a marketing issue, you have to convince people that they have a problem that you have the answer for)

Additional complication, some number of people that are the ideal market would be people that legit have the right to use these streaming services and will use the VPN to route around inappropriate roadblocks. Some other (I believe larger, much larger) number of people actually don’t have the rights to use these services and you are helping them violate the terms of service they agreed to. I won’t debate the wisdom of building a business with the primary market being people who are not just willing to violate terms of service but that they desire to do so. I will note that if you basically build a business on “screw netflix and warner and everyone else!” that if netflix&warner&friends feel enough of the pinch that they decide to “see you in court” it is more then an outside chance that you get crushed.

Yeah, I kept mine as the value went up, and then back down. Eventually decided I hadn’t played in a decade and sold them all for $15k which was far more then I bought them for (I bought them a combination of retail and wholesale prices for random packs, never bought a card specifically, nor traded, just bought mass quantities and ended up with some interesting things).

Virtual items do have monetary value, and have for a substantial number of years now. People have been paying real dollars to buy WoW gold for well over a decade, and I assume in games before that.

People value what people value, it sounds dumb because it is so obvious, except people forget it all the time. Something you think is worthless (I assume WoW gold, and Fortnite skins) someone on earth would like to have, and they want it more then they want dollars. It may not make much sense to you, but I’m sure someone wants “a thing” in WoW enough to decide that grinding in parts of the game they don’t find fun is worth trading $5 to get what they want instead of a late at Starbucks. You might think the Latte is worth $5 and a ton of WoW gold is absolutely not, and when it is your $5 your opinion counts, it is basically a fact at the point. If it is someone else’s $5 your opinion is worth less then a warm bucket of spit, and their opinion becomes “basically” fact. That is the cool thing about money it is worth what a buyer and seller agree it is worth.

I personally don’t like buying micro parts of games, but I am willing to buy entire games, and if I’m willing to spend say $45 on a while world, it makes sense to me that some people might pay $1 for a little part of that world, they are saying in effect that it is worth 2% of what the overall experience is to me. Sort of, because money isn’t even with the same amount to everyone. Someone that pays mortgage, food, taxes, and such and has $50 left over for the week is going to be a little stingier with those dollars then someone that pays those things (or has them payed by someone else) and has $1000 or more left over is going to spend those dollars much more freely.

Is it really that weird to you that someone might value a virtual designer purse that exists only so people can show it off (looks fancy!) much like people value real designer purses that exist to both serve the same functions a far less expensive mass market purse and also so people can show it off (looks fancy!)?

Does something have to physically exist for you to decide it has value? Is an entire video game a thing that has value or not? Does the answer change if that game comes on a CD-ROM or is merely a download?

Is it just items inside a game that you don’t think have value? I have to say I’m kind of with you there, I don’t think they tend to rate thousand dollar values to me, nor do individual items tend to rate any signigant value to me (I’m not thrilled with paying say $1 for a stat boost), but I’m clear about the “to me” part. I can see other people making other choices. Like someone wanting in-game gear that makes them more like their peers, maybe no dumber then purchasing the right gym gear at 4x the price of normal gym stuff.

I don’t pay extra for fancy gym clothes though. I don’t tend to pay extra for style period. I pay extra for warm and durable clothes, but not sharp lookin’ stylish clothes. Some people live in warmer places and pay extra for stuff they like the looks of, but not a cent for stuff that is winter-warm because they don’t need that.

It is just as if not more illegal and 10 times the size of any gambling going on with steam

Except as defined here gambling requires a game of chance and a predictive market at least in theory is not about chance but predicting actual events, which in most cases will involve skill (unless the particular event is “what ping pong balls will be pulled from the bucket” or “what numbers on the dice after roll”, but things like “will Russia end the Ukraine war by the end of 2026” are arguably skill based).

More money changes hands in predictive markets. I mean more money changes hands in the stock market but that isn’t considered gambling (although for people that don’t really know what they are doing it basically is).

Managers can only enforce the forced formulaic politeness when they are around. To get dystopian enforcement of arbitrary rules you need some sort of robotic enforcers. I mean the current ones can only be so effective without the direct feedback of a built in taser.

I demand that my midnight BK whoppers are served with the a lifeless greeting and formulaic sign off. (and to be fair there is no BK around here, and last time I had one near by I stopped going because they “only accept cash” on the late shift (too hard to steal credit card transactions I assume), and were out of basically all burgers and fry’s, only had a few chicken sandwiches and maybe a fish thing, I probably should have avoided ordering anything at all, but I was hungry...and not much else was open!)

Yep, I thought of Burger-G right away...I wasn’t sure anyone else had ever read that book though!

It is too bad I can’t find (or rember the name of) most of the k5k faction I loved, since k5k vanished before I snarfed any copies!

If you can't manage to compose yourself when dealing with the public for this job, you're not worthy of it or any other job

Well there is the job of entitled asshat which doesn’t require composure. Sadly demand is low and supply is high, but you could help out by vacating the post so one of these “grown-ass children” can take a job you believe they are qualified for. I’m not sure they will have your natural talent though.

Maybe, I mean it is all random conjecture. We have only the facts “US=more innovation, EU=less” not any real way to determining the cause. However I lived in the UK for a few months back when it was part of the EU and it didn’t feel any less free then the USA did. Granted I didn’t try to start a business in the UK, and I just kept working for my US company taking pay in my US account, and paying US taxes, and paying for stuff in the UK. Buildings were older, plumbing was weird, and random things seemed very outdated, and other things seemed more modern then in the US (at the time home internet was way ahead, in the US the backwaters had dial up and very rarely ISDN at 64 to 120Kbits while the UK seemed otherwise have at least th slow megabits even in the backwaters).

So if I had to make a guess I would say “personal freedom for the innovative individual” would not really be a thing the US has a monopoly on. If anything lots of studies have been done showing the US healthcare system tends to be a substantial drag on people being self employed. I know my personal insurance has gone from about $280 a paycheck to $3700 a month since leaving my last full time employer and starting my own company.