Gambling systems always play into human psychology, and are always not in your favor.

So is poker not gambling? Mahjong? When it’s 4 people playing together (not at a casino, for instance), how can it always be you who has worse odds? That’s of course rhetorical; you actual have equal odds, barring cheating or simple skill differences.

And once you make “playing a game that you are likely to lose” as the litmus test for what is gambling, why would you play any competitive games? Half of a competitive bracket has to lose more than they won, by definition.

You are conflating gambling as it happens within controlled, predatory, capitalist institutions, with Gambling as a concept. Gambling is not immoral or harmful intrinsically, but gambling institutions that intentionally exploit addiction to Gambling, are. Institutions that intentionally exploit addiction to alcohol or cigarettes or hoarding or whatever, also are. But it doesn’t make alcohol as a chemical compound itself, immoral.

And just in case it needs to be stated, merely enjoying Gambling doesn’t equate to gambling addiction.

It does, but being Google they pulled the more granular controls like screen time settings into a dedicated app: Google Family Link

The author of that piece would say you protect your code by not open sourcing it (or by using a license that grants no rights to use said source). It’s an incredibly frustrating piece to me, because it presents hampering corporations as more important than not screwing over individual FOSS users.

The reason they blame GPLv3 is because they claim the open sourcing requirements within it are so onerous that corporations just avoid it, making it so that rather than corporations contributing to that software, they often end up supplanting it with their own versions that have alternate licensing, which then not only denies the original author any benefit, but even makes the corporation ‘look good’ to people who don’t realize or care what happened.

It’s so frustrating to me because they’re doing this whole “pragmatism over idealism” claim, while also not acknowledging that FOSS as a movement is the only reason any corporation open sources anything now. They certainly didn’t used to. But the author seemingly would rather people not have any tools made with or by companies, who are benefiting from them financially, than have both corporations and individual users benefit from them. That’s ideology over pragmatism as well.

Capitalism is bad, but it’s bad because it entrenches profit over morality, via the mistaken belief/ false premise that competing interests will average out in the end. It’s not bad because every single output it creates is somehow evil incarnate, which seems to be the author’s gist.

Nah, sorry Zelensky. I understand that you want US and EU support because you’re in a war, but Trump is literally just a wannabe-Putin. He’s doing literally right now to Iran what Russia is doing to Ukraine. It’s even a ‘special-not-a-war-operation’. Hell, he’s already tried to sell Ukraine down the river multiple times now by floating Russian “peace agreements” that amounted to Ukranian surrenders.

We need to become so isolated and ostracized that these disinterested, delusional Americans stop thinking we’re “world leaders” in anything other than violent imperialism.

“sorry, I can’t deploy to Iran today, I have to wash my deck”

dryer lint fires tend to happen most often by the lint not getting cleaned out, and getting squished into the internals and coming in contact with the dryer heating elements and igniting. Lint is basically a perfect tinder material, because it burns fast and hot. You can actually save your dryer lint to use for campfires. in my experience, it’s nearly as good as char cloth.

Just a way to legally grift. This isn’t even gambling, it’s just a get-rich-quick scheme, like crypto.

I don’t know where you got the idea that sports betting is the only betting with a wagered outcome, that’s basically all card or table games at a casino.

My point of mentioning casinos having more than just slot machines is to say that they are first and foremost gambling establishments. Not every game in a casino actually is gambling, either; a lot of them have regular arcade games too.

The question of whether trading cards and loot boxes are gambling from a legal perspective is down to how the laws are written, and the laws in the US currently haven’t defined them as such so far, because there is no wager on a specific outcome.

If loot boxes allowed you to pay more in order to get more good items on a ‘win’, my guess is they’d be smacked with a gambling designation instantly.

Or if trading cards allowed you to wager on the presence of specific cards in the pack, and win additional booster packs if correct, for instance.

If casinos want to say some of their games have been improperly classified as gambling because those games don’t have those characteristics, they certainly can go to the gaming commission or take them to court and argue that (and depending on the game they may even be correct), but since they have to have a license anyways for all their other games that definitely are gambling, they probably won’t care to.

And there are in fact slot machine games that aren’t gambling (e.g. CloverPit), that just simulate playing a slot machine without actually having any real monetary mechanic (apart from paying for the game), so just being a slot machine doesn’t inherently make it a gambling game.

Not to go too philosophical, but every physical item you buy is physically unique from each other one. Even with processes like Six Sigma to minimize variations, each car, table, chair etc is physically unique, and each in ways that affect its performance. You could buy 100,000 chairs of the same kind, and figure out which one is ‘best’ based on some characteristic (e.g. max weight), but that doesn’t make “buying a chair” gambling, just because you may will get a worse or better chair each time.

Except slot machines do allow different wagers to get different monetary returns. Also, casinos are not just slot machines, but lots of other gambling games as well.

Parental controls usually only require a password to unlock or bypass, so if you’re worried you’ll just unlock it yourself you may want to ask a trusted friend/ family/ partner to set the password for you.

Not really, it’s a way to sell you 25 year old games for $50. They saw Nintendo’s Virtual Console and wanted in on that same grift.

How so?

Yes, they’re exactly that; plush doll random chance boxes. It’s funny because gachapons have actually been in the US and Europe for 50+ years, but no one ever really thought of them like this because the toys inside never had real value.

Remember these outside of supermarkets?

I mean gambling in general, not just loot boxes or TCGs. Gambling is not a bad thing. Gambling addiction is, but it’s bad because it’s addiction.

me to know which people to block

Frankly, I don’t mind. I don’t love being accused of posting in bad faith and berated just because you forgot what you originally posted. Cheers.

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Yep. There are too many people who don’t understand addiction, and think that gambling is the root cause problem, rather than one of many systems that preys on addiction disorders.

The reality of addiction is that it will always find something to fulfill it without treatment, and banning or regulating every trend of collectibles that pops up is not an actual solution. Banning or regulating specific structures that intentionally prey on addiction is important.

Too many people mistake their feeling-based objection to gambling that was inherited from the protestant moral objections, with actually being about solving predation on addiction.

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MVV app is super convenient, but I could still use the kiosks without too much added delay. MVVswipe is like 30 seconds to “check out” a ticket, MVV kiosk machine is like 90 seconds. The biggest inconvenience is having to find a kiosk outside of a train station.