Even buying a game digitally from most storefronts doesn’t mean you actually own it. You simply buy a license to play it. Look what happens if your Steam account gets permanently banned for violating their ToS, you’ll lose access to any game you paid for on that account. Same thing with Microsoft or Sony. I think GOG might be an exception to this, where they will never revoke access to the games you previously bought, but I am not 100% sure of their policies.
Regardless, all gamers will never fully embrace subscription purity. There are so many games that require a lot of time to complete, especially so if you’re an adult with lots of responsibilities who can only game here and there. For example, Baldur’s Gate 3 is massive and I’ve owned it since launch. I’ve only gotten to Act 2 with like 60 hours clocked in and I still want to play it to finish. However, if it was on a subscription service, I’d be constantly stressed that it’d be leaving the subscription any day.
And what about classic games (includes new games that become instant classics) I’ll know I’ll always treasure and want to be able to play whenever I’m in the mood? To this day, my wife will randomly bust out Mario 64 or even a more niche game like Fable 2 and just have them be her comfort food for a lazy weekend. Hell, just a few months ago we got our our original Xbox to play some Fuzion Frenzy for nostalgia sake. Can’t do that with subscription models.
Anyway, sorry for the tangent. I just absolutely loathe this crushing pressure by corporations to force our entire economy into being rent based. Every expert economist has been warning us about the dangers of this for at least the last 10+ years, and yet consumers keep blindly marching towards it because it’s “convenient,” totally ignoring the long-term consequences.
You could do way more than just get Bitcoin. You could do shorts/puts on all types of market spikes/crashes and just normal investing in Apple, Google, Tesla, Amazon, etc etc. You could literally become a multi-multi billionaire.
That is, if going back to 6 years old also means that you’ll at least be 18 way before or by the time the mid-90s/early 2000s rolled around.
You’re misunderstanding the basics of banking like the other fellow I responded to. I provided a link by the IMF that explains the fundamentals in another reply. I’ll provide another one: investopedia.com/…/fractionalreservebanking.asp
Normal commercial banks cannot just print money, which is exactly what you’re implying with “phantom money.” The money has to come from somewhere and/or be backed by something. So no, a bank can’t just magically turn $1000 into $10,000 without something securing the additional money or the extra money coming from other funds. Only the Fed (or other countries’ central banks/governments) can print money on a whim.
From the very source you linked–which isn’t even a good source to begin with since very little of the actual responses there use their cited sources correctly, often quoting shit out of context or misinterpreting the source material:
The “out of nothing” aspect of your question is more complex. In my personal view, and I guess that’s only an opinion, is that because banks are government regulated and insured institutions, forced to back each loan with reserves, and regulated to have capital for each of those loans, they cannot really be said to make this private money out of nothing.
But again, that’s just one user’s response. Not a credible source. So here:
Creating money
Banks also create money. They do this because they must hold on reserve, and not lend out, some portion of their deposits—either in cash or in securities that can be quickly converted to cash. The amount of those reserves depends both on the bank’s assessment of its depositors’ need for cash and on the requirements of bank regulators, typically the central bank—a government institution that is at the center of a country’s monetary and banking system. Banks keep those required reserves on deposit with central banks, such as the U.S. Federal Reserve, the Bank of Japan, and the European Central Bank. Banks create money when they lend the rest of the money depositors give them. This money can be used to purchase goods and services and can find its way back into the banking system as a deposit in another bank, which then can lend a fraction of it. The process of relending can repeat itself a number of times in a phenomenon called the multiplier effect. The size of the multiplier—the amount of money created from an initial deposit—depends on the amount of money banks must keep on reserve.
Banks also lend and recycle excess money within the financial system and create, distribute, and trade securities.
Banks have several ways of making money besides pocketing the difference (or spread) between the interest they pay on deposits and borrowed money and the interest they collect from borrowers or securities they hold. They can earn money from
•income from securities they trade; and
•fees for customer services, such as checking accounts, financial and investment banking, loan servicing, and the origination, distribution, and sale of other financial products, such as insurance and mutual funds.
Banks earn on average between 1 and 2 percent of their assets (loans and securities). This is commonly referred to as a bank’s return on assets.
Which is a more detailed explanation of what I originally said. Yes, they create money. But it’s coming from somewhere and backed by something and not just magically imagined.
In the US, the Fed can just print money, and they have numerous times. But that’s because they’re legally allowed to. Banks don’t have the authority to straight up print new cash without something backing it up (e.g. reserves, assets, securities, transactions, etc.)
Wow, I thought they’d raised it back up after COVID “ended.” How ridiculous, you’d think that would be one of the first tools they’d use to address inflation outside of just raising interest rates.
That is not true. This is typically how bank loans work: You make an account at a bank and deposit, say, $1000. Before 2020, the Fed would require the bank to retain something like 10% of that $1000 (just using 10% in this example, I haven’t looked up what the ratio was pre-2020). So they’d deposit $100 of your cash to keep on hand and could then loan out the other $900 to those seeking a loan.
However, the Fed set that reserve ratio to 0% in 2020, which is idiotic in the long-term and also likely a main contributor several banks collapsed in 2022/2023 as the Fed started raising interest rates (I’m no economic expert by any means, so I could be wrong on the main contributing factor).
I think you’re mixing up regular banks with the federal reserve, who definitely can just print money out of thin air.
I think a lot of folks have a fundamental misunderstanding of how loans work. The banks don’t get to just magically conjure up as much money as that want. It is backed by actual money/assets and federal regulations require a certain ratio between what the bank has loaned and the amount of money they have readily on hand.
I agree that it’s not a perfect system, and I definitely think “businesses” that offer those sketchy payday loan arrangements should be illegal, as they often price gouge the shit out of the interest rates (in fact, I believe many states have outlawed them). But I don’t know of a better solution that isn’t dependent on a utopian-esque idea.
I Am Legend is a fantastic book, but not what I was thinking about. I looked it up and it was actually Blindsight I was thinking of. Regardless, I always recommend people read I Am Legend, it’s a lot different than the movie (which I also enjoyed).
What book is it that tries to scientifically explain vampires? It talks about why vampires don’t like crosses and it’s because of some irrational fear of symmetrical geometry or something. In other words it has nothing to do with religion, according to that book’s mythos. I thought it was a neat alternative take on the genre. Iirc it was a sci-fi book.
Edit: I looked it up, the book I was thinking of is called Blindsight. I believe the reasoning they provide in the book is that due to their unique spatial reasoning, too many right angles give them seizures.
Pretty sure custom campaigns will definitely arrive at some point, just like they did with DOS2. I want to say Larian has even stated that they’ll eventually open the doors for it and potentially modding support?
You can shut down all telemetry in Windows Pro/Enterprise, I believe. You probably could with regular, too, especially if you’re blocking all Microsoft domains via DNS, firewall, or other methods.