The FBI has resumed purchasing reams of Americans' data and location histories to aid federal investigations
Do we still use this term? Are people seriously delivering 500 million stacks of paper with dot-matrix-printed text noting who showed up at which Starbucks and when?
No. They're not. We could just ballpark the data in GB/TB/PB.
The quarterly report standard was set to ensure that the public is sufficiently well-informed about the fiscal health of publicly traded companies prior to their making investment decisions. Moving to a 6-month cycle increases the knowledge gap between the general public and those with inside knowledge.
Some people will see a benefit and get an expensive keyboard with a split space bar. Good for them. Everyone else will continue using the absolutely massive number of keyboards following the standard format.
If we increase our investment just 10-fold, we could probably get that to 16 minutes per day. Imagine the possibilities!
From the press release:
But they can have significant monetary value. Rare items from Counter-Strike alone have sold for thousands of dollars on third-party marketplaces, and the overall market for Counter-Strike skins has been estimated at more than $4 billion.
Nearly every user who opens a loot box receives an item worth far less than the price of the key. For example, a user who pays $2.71 to open a Counter-Strike weapons case will almost certainly receive a skin worth only a few cents — an item that could have been purchased directly for a fraction of the cost. But the remote chance of winning an item worth hundreds or thousands of dollars is what drives users to keep spending, just as with a slot machine or lottery ticket.
No loot box items have monetary value because the policy prohibits transacting digital items for real currency. One NEEDS to participate in an illicit market to turn an item into currency.
Why are you so upset about this?
I'm not "upset", per se. I just don't tolerate wrapping less popular causes in more popular causes. The goal of this lawsuit is to punish Valve for their part in crashing illicit market that I described. The "think of the children" call to action is to distract from this.
Do you feel that you are being threatened by this action?
Nope. I've never purchased a loot box and don't gamble. In fact, I despise the massive increase of easy gambling over the last 10 years. The only threat to me, as an elder gamer, is the potential momentum of the "think of the children" cause which was a **massive** detriment to gamers/gaming until relatively recently.
Why are you so quick to dismiss this as a personal fault of those affected by these "ADULT MEN"?
I'm drawing a very stark difference between the claimants-- the VAST majority of people who have gambled these funds away are adult men, not children. I find it shameful that they're using the exceedingly small proportion of related loot box purchases from children as a front-and-center cause. It's disingenuous at the very least and I personally find it downright shameful.
If they actually wanted to allege that "Children have been had access to gambling games and Valve should have been able to prevent that," that's fine. They would then need to show an approximate number of affected children, and approximate money expended, and most importantly, why it's unreasonable for the parents of said children to oversee their children's access and actions. The numbers would be comparably small.
But they're not doing that.
If they were honest about trying to stop **online gambling**, they would go after Draft Kings, Fan Duel, Fanatics, BetMGM, and on and on.
But they're not doing that.
This is not an anti-loot-box case. This is a case meant to compensate those involved in illicit markets for the massive and immediate devaluing of their digital items.
The "think of the children" aspect is ridiculous on its face.
Counter-Strike 2, Dota 2, and Team Fortress 2 are "carefully engineered to extract money from consumers, including children
How much money do children have? Don't you think that a purported evil gambling company (Valve?) would know that children don't have much money at all, let alone access to their own credit cards with which to purchase in-game currency?
Can we just drop that charade and say what's really going on:
1. Some ADULT MEN gambled a large amount of money using a combination of in-game currency and money-laundering sites
2. Valve crashed that illicit economy by making it easier to obtain previously rare in-game items (https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikestubbs/2025/10/23/valve-just-crashed-the-high-end-counter-strike-skins-market/)
3. Those ADULT MEN are now they're angry.
What's that? Some children have stolen their parents' credit cards and used them online? Wow... has that ONLY happened with Valve loot boxes or has it happened with Amazon purchases, porn sites, etc.? Ya... That's a parent-child issue and not a gambling concern worthy of months of litigation.
I agree and disagree.
Corporations are obviously not alive and thus have none of that stuff. They're contractual arrangements. However, corporations are operated by humans. Those humans make decisions in the name of "the corporation". Those humans are choosing to put the financial advancement of the owners, investors, and higher ups above those of the workers.
This isn't an issue of being absent of a heart because that would imply a lack of malice. These decisions are made by black-hearted people. People with the capability of caring, but who choose not to.
Without seeing a full multi-month chart of Linux use, I think it's safe to say that there was an abnormal spike (maybe people playing with Proton in anticipation of new Valve Hardware releases) and then going back to what they normally do when Valve announced the hardware delays.
And baseball cards. And computer processors ("silicon lottery"). And Woot.com bags of crap (https://www.woot.com/offers/bag-o-crap-8).
It's a charter flight on a 6-prop helicopter piloted by a human (with hopes of being autonomous in the future). All standard flight and landing requirements apply.
Ride-hailing's innovation was the deception of lawmakers and the app-based dispatch.
Where's the innovation here?
Texas is now poised to surpass California as the nation's largest storage market
So they may soon have the most electricity storage via battery... Is something supposed to happen if they do? Do they get a prize? Does something happen to California if they're no longer #1?
In what ways does PG&E work against "home installations and other projects"?
American standardized testing isn't particularly different from elsewhere. People just don't like being tested nor do they like that progression within the system is based on testing.
I don't think it's as flawed as "has always been total bullshit".
Standardized testing, first and foremost, exists to evaluate the effectiveness of educational treatments on TENS of MILLIONS of students in the US. Tens of millions. I welcome you to provide any other measurement methodology that costs the same or less in time or money while maintaining similar levels accuracy in measuring the scholastic progression of students.
And doing poorly in standardized testing has never intended to, nor has their results ever been interpreted en masse as implying "everyone must fit this exact mold or else you're an absolute failure". In reality, it only measures what its intended to measure:
1. Is the student's reading comprehension sufficiently strong to understand the question?
2. Is the student's subject-matter mastery sufficiently strong to respond to the question correctly?
If the student scores are below par, then you know the answer to at least one of those questions is "No" and you need to go back and find out what went wrong? Here are some common reasons:
1. The student has sub-par reading comprehension and hasn't made sufficient progress this year to take tests independently.
2. The student has sub-par subject-matter mastery because of attendance, lack of home support, need for different explanations, or need for more subject reinforcement.
3. The student has a cognitive disability which makes either learning the subject-matter atypically difficulty.
4. The student has a cognitive disability which makes taking the test atypically difficult as a task.
5. The educator has made insufficient effort to teach the subject-matter.
If the reason is #1, then you can designate remedial education. If the reason is #2, that's for bringing up in parent-teacher conference. If the reason is #3 or #4, then there are legal mandates to accommodate these disabilities and make an individual education plan to meet the student's needs. If the reason is #5, then corrective action is taken with the educator.
Now we have a generation of people who learned different skills other than the default assumed ones, and they're viewed as failures for it.
No one is considered a failure for learning other skills. However, they will not progress within the academic sphere if they do not learn academic skills. That's reasonable and rational. The education system both educates and filters out people who choose not to progress further in certain areas so that those who progress to expertise are most likely to want to be experts in their fields. A neurologist that failed all his biology classes from high school through med school would be a danger to his patients.
Lastly, and most importantly since too many people never learn this-- The goals of the educational process do not include "passing tests and getting good grades". The primary goal is that the student learn the subject-matter, but the only way such a poorly-funded/supported educational system can evaluate a whether a student is learning subject-matter is to ask that student to prove that they know it (ie. testing). And the only way to do so in a way that is equitably applied to everyone is to test everyone using the same instrument (ie. Standardized Testing).
To mitigate tort liability and preserve financial partnerships.
As in certain cults it is possible to kill a process if you know its true name. -- Ken Thompson and Dennis M. Ritchie
