Yeah. That was so clear (IMO) that It didn’t even occur to me that this person may not already know.

Maybe in the case of windows 11 that will be true, but in the past that has not been the case. When Windows 8 came out regular users were “upgrading” new machines to windows 7.

As a supply chain guy, I’m confident my procurement skills of bitching at vendors about off spec shit goes back to the days of Ea-Nasir.

Vapes - A shitty, ewaste laden, version of smoking. Where unknown chemicals are vaporized and inhaled. This took off under claims it was a healthier alternative to smoking. This is going to look like radioactive toothpaste in hindsight.

Cable boxes - 30 years after high speed Internet, 25 years after ffmpeg, and 20 years after streaming… millions of people still pay $150 a month for a shittier, curated version of television that mostly required specialized hardware and drilling holes in your house.

Any exchange of money for goods or services is spending it. Not all exchanges are instant. Not all spending is exchanging it for goods and services.

Most definitions are something like: “to give money as a payment for something” - Cambridge “To use up or pay out” - Webster “To pay out or away; to disburse or expend; to dispose of, or deprive oneself of, in this way” -Oxford

In most legal and financial contexts money willingly disposed of and specifically money willingly given to a 2nd party would be considered “spent”.

You can donate your money, decline a receipt, and have spent the money with no goods or services in exchange. You can spend the money today with the expectation of goods or services and not receive them immediately or, sometimes, ever. If you choose to throw 20 grand in the garbage that probably counts as spending it by some definitions.

Yeah.

The challenge was to spend the 20 grand by the end of the day. Not to exchange it for equivalent goods in hand.

But not difficult to pay for in a day. The contracter will happily take a $20,000 deposit.

I’m rabidly pro-consumer about most things but I struggle with how we define a market when we talk about steam. In order for steam to be a monopoly you have to drill down through super categories of software sales and then video game sales, to the platform level.

If you look at all digital delivery video game sales they still don’t have a monopoly. You don’t have to deal with steam to play a video game. It’s only PC video game sales where they are close to a controlling market share.

But Steam has far less power over PC gaming than Apple, Sony, or Nintendo do over their respective platforms. Gamers and Devs basically HAVE to deal with those companies to have access to their markets.