This very much is debt. Is it your contention that debt can ONLY arise with an exchange of cash? Because as an accountant I find this preposterous. Under IFRS 16 we recognise, for example, long-term leases as debt, because they are obligations to the business. An obligation to pay in the future is almost the definition of debt. An interest rate is not part of that definition, necessarily.
Industrial scale is difficult for most people to understand, and therefore easy to use to generate outrage. I used to work at a pulp mill, one that would be fairly small by American standards. Some of the numbers were nonetheless crazy by domestic comparisons. We used 90 million litres of water per day. That one sticks with me.
What is "long term" to you? Playstation is more than 30 years old and Xbox is more than 25 years old. Steam is over 20 years old and PC gaming hugely pre-dates that. How long do they have to exist before you'll accept they are successful products?
With the advent of the internet and email, many people surely made similar observations. I wonder what the fate is of the companies who refused to accept these productivity enhancements.
Surely you realise that no insurance company will continually indemnify a company which knowingly and repeatedly breaks the law, resulting in losses to the insurance company? Surely you understand that this isn't how insurance works?
Why would American taxpayers be paying more because of a settlement against a private company? Shouldn't this contribute to the tax take, causing taxpayers to pay LESS?
I cannot imagine being so hostile towards curiosity. You approach this as "I already know everything there is to know, and therefore this documentary (that I haven't seen) has no value".
Without competition Valve would never have bothered making Steam faster. Steam hasn't meaningfully changed in a decade, and feels well out of date. I celebrate Epic forcing Valve to finally make some improvements. Turns out they could do it in a day all along.
Isn't this a little reductive? I'm not an expert on LLM/AI technology, but isn't the secret sauce the reasoning layer? Isn't that what makes Claude et al so much more powerful than a more "vanilla" LLM? That's what they're trying to protect in this post, which seems awfully reasonable?
Cash is not widely used here. And there are no DIRECT expenses you can associate with cash. Sure there's the additional overhead of banking etc but there are no fees charged to the merchant for cash receipts.
I know what has happened in Australia and I hate it for the reasons established above.
It's popular politically because to voters it just looks like "our party will take away that expensive surcharge and make it cheaper at the till!". Unfortunately that message actually works.