Yes it does. Something with no monetary value isn't covered by any gambling regulation. The existence of a trading market place with actual value is what separates lootboxes that fall afoul of gambling laws from lootboxes that offer things such as random non-tradable cosmetics.
Without a trading mechanism you're not gambling as you have no gains. That's is a core tenant to gambling laws - the ability to gain monetary reward from chance.
How much money do children have?
You're joking right? The number you're looking for is an average of around $40/month from those under the age of 18 who participate in games that have in app purchases. It's a fucking HUUUUUUGE industry. It's not the children's money. That doesn't mean it isn't being spent. Your argument is like saying why does McDonalds offer Happymeals if children don't have jobs and can't afford burgers.
And in any case you miss the wider point of the "think of the children" part. We have a huge abundance of evidence that getting addicted to the concept of a chance reward system leads to gambling and higher spending later in life. Exposing children to games of chance is objectively and verifiably bad in many ways which is precisely *why* it is regulated.
2. Valve crashed that illicit economy
Your conspiracy fails in the fact that Valve has been in the crosshairs of both regulators and consumer interest groups LONG before their recent system change.
2018: Valve got fucked by the regulators in the Netherlands for their lootboxes.
2022: Valve got fucked by the courts in Washington for their lootboxes.
2023: Valve got fucked by the courts in Austria for their lootboxes.
2024: Australian government introduces regulations on lootboxes citing specifically Valve's implementation as a target.
2024: South Korea's GRAC took action against valve on lootboxes.
Pretending this is all because a few people lost money when Valve changed the rules in 2025 is just complete and total ignorance of what has been going on in this space in the past decade.
By the logic used by both the AG and this firm, every collectible card system is also gambling.
That includes baseball cards that my '46 Boomer dad grew up collecting.
Only if you pay money and have no idea what card you're going to get or its value. That is an aspect of collecting baseball cards and guess what, it is considered a form of gambling. You may have noticed that a lot of companies involved in this practice are currently waging a marketing campaign to convince people it's not gambling. Why do you think that may be? Hint: Regulators have taken notice.
No it's not. Betting on horses is for all but the rarest of cases a bunch of people looking at a prancing pony or guessing how good it'll be based on a name. The gambling aspect of it is consumer based and information based. There is very little information published on horses, while there is extensive information published on public companies, and the ownership of those stocks gives you an actual meaningful say in that company (which is why you get voting forms prior to AGMs for companies in which you hold stock in).
You don't get to vote how your horserider rides. You don't get to vote to have the rider replaced if they under perform.
Have you ever actually owned stock? I'm guessing by the way you talk that you haven't.
meaning fewer ads for users in those countries
It means nothing of the sort. It means less variance for ads for users in those countries. It reminds me of that time Spotify only had one customer and back when I was on the free tier I heard the same single advert every hour for months. The frequency a user experiences ads doesn't change if the number of advertisers don't show up.
2. A really decent screen. 75% more pixels than 1080p
This really isn't a selling point for me. Nothing good comes from pushing more pixels on underpowered hardware. 1080p screens have a purpose. Now maybe Apple's silicon is better than the competitors (I certainly hope so, my work laptop goes to shit at home simply because I plug a 4k monitor into it rather than the 1080p ones we have in the office), but in any case I wouldn't celebrate a spec that requires power on a device marketed to have little of it.
What this really offers that no one else does, is MacOS based system at a previously unattainable price point. That integration thing you mentioned is key. For many people even talk about build quality is irrelevant (and also have you touched one, if not how do you know?)
One reviewer was editing 4K video in Davinci Resolve then switched over to edit a 4K video in Final Cut Pro then switched over to Chrome.
Just because you can, doesn't mean you enjoy what you're doing. You can do that on a shitty Windows PC as well if only to prove a point. But if you're the type of user who knows that Davinci Resolve and Final Cut Pro are then you're not going to be buying a Macbook Neo even if you use this software only occasinally.
You're drawing the wrong comparison here. You don't need to pretend the Macbook Neo is something it isn't, we need to call out Asus for pretending their shitty $500-600 notebooks are anything more than the consumption based device that they are actually used for.
people are still buying windows laptops with 8GB or even 4
These are consumption devices as well. You can do basically fuck all with computers with that spec these days. Would something as basic as Lightroom even run on 4GB? It is barely functional on 8GB.
Lets face it most low end laptops are used for watching youtube videos, typing a simple word document, and sending an email. Workhorse machines need far higher specs than that.
The way I see it, it's a glorified Chromebook at an inflated price. You kinda get what you're paying for here. It's not like it goes head to head with the rest of the Mac laptop line. No expandability, USB 2 only, no touch ID, slow charging, It really is a cheap notebook.
The reason to shit on Chromebooks have nothing to do with the hardware which makes your comparison rather silly. You can do a world more with old hardware running a real OS than fast hardware running a glorified web interface. The Chromebook comparison is quite ignorant.
Purchasing something with a lead time isn't hording. Hording is buying something without the intent to use it. The now is, will the order be cancelled? I doubt OpenAI intend to take delivery of a rapidly depreciating asset which generates no revenue for them.
That's a very narrow view when talking about a company who has just had literally many 10s of billions of investment evaporate, largely due to a question of potential profitability.
AI is like Bitcoin was when the first ASICs hit the market. There's a very VERY real return on investment related equation to not having yesterday's hardware.
Valve would need to "buy" the loot box item back off the player and give the player cash.
They wouldn't. You only need a mechanism to convert the item to cash. Valve provides precisely that which is fundamentally why this is gambling. You give money to get something of random and unknown value in real cash terms.
You're being dishonest, you cut out the very thing that would have pointed you to evidence that buying or selling stock options is not gambling. The "outcome" is not based on a contest of chance, and your future value is influenced by the information available to you at the time of purchase of stocks.
If you think stocks are gambling, then please don't invest in stocks since you're doing it very wrong. Stocks are a risk based game, and if you're not managing the risk through making yourself informed then you are gambling with something that isn't supposed to be gambling.
The cost of backing out may be offset by the efficiency change as well. Projects need to be reviewed at all stage of execution and there should always be a willingness to back out if some variable changes. I'm not sure what happened here, but I've certainly been on a project where there was a financially beneficial reason why the project was delayed. We were literally told to slow down our progress in the name of making the project more viable.
To be fair I don't think this has anything to do with lying. More to do with the rapidly changing nature of the industry. E.g.
- Open was never fully open. There was always a closed aspect to it.
- Non-profit was fine being non-profit right until cost and contracts needed to get involved. It's hard to run a non-profit if your business depends on insane capital injections, you can't raise that kind of money as a non-profit. Elon knew this as well which is one of the reasons he bailed.
- Cash from NVIDIA was promised by NVIDIA. This wasn't Sam's lie, this was announced by all parties involved. Except the financial situation has changed considerably. NVIDIA still did contribute a huge capital injection, they just backed out of it now.
- No developer jobs - yeah this was a lie. Same embellishing bullshit that all CEOs do.
- Refusing Pentagon money - that's easy to do when you have a major financial backer, it's quite a difficult thing to do when other financial backers pull out and investors start asking question.
- The stargate back-out is just standard run of the mill major project stuff. That isn't a lie, it's a project process. You have an idea, you kick off a project, and at multiple stages of the project you review if it still makes sense to go ahead. Backing out isn't a sign of lying or weakness, it's actually one example of *good* leadership.
So while I disagree he's a lier (except for the developer bit), I still very much agree he's a dirty cunt.
DEC diagnostics would run on a dead whale. -- Mel Ferentz
