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Lootboxes are gambling (Official Statement)
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You stay sassy!
In the correct proportion this adds to the game play and is fun. The problem with cash-shop / loot-crate games is not just that they carve those things out of the game in order to sell it to you for extra $$, it's that they have an incentive to over-do it by several orders of magnitude making them all more trivial and annoying than anything else.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
Taxation of dangerous/destructive/costly activities is actually a win-win for society, whether folks wanna believe it or not. It's not an outright ban and destruction of a freedom, but it ensures that those activities are discouraged and, if they are undertaken, it looks to recoup the costs to society.
Taxation is nice because it doesn't take away a freedom, but it can still be used to discourage dangerous activities that the government has deemed to hold very little benefit to society at large.
EDIT- that concept can be seen applied elsewhere, too. There's ideas that have floated in D.C. about requiring accidental death/dismemberment insurance for any gun owners. It imparts more responsibility on the gun owner to secure their items (guns locked away in safes could be insured at a discount, for instance), and provides a safety net for society should you or someone that stole your gun go on a shooting spree.
The reason there are high taxes on cigarettes in most states is that it's a politically popular tax. The primary reason for this is that while most people won't admit it, their basic philosophy of taxes is, as one politician put it decades ago, "Don't tax you, don't tax me, tax that fellow behind a tree". The most popular taxes are the ones that you and your friends don't pay but someone else does. Most people don't smoke and thus know that a cigarette tax will bring in a lot of money without them personally having to pay it.
Some people may rationalize their support for a tax on cigarettes as being that smoking should be discouraged because it's unhealthy. But if that were all that went into it, we'd see the same support for that tax among smokers as non-smokers. We'd also expect to see people support high taxes on the unhealthy things that they personally do or consume or whatever. But to the extent that anyone bothers to propose a junk food tax, it's generally very narrowly targeted at only a tiny slice of unhealthy foods and also pretty unpopular.
This is also a worldwide site so it may be that governments do pay - or that private health care is compulsory like Switzerland say. Very different models of uniersal coverage but both would be / are impacted.
The rights of non-smokers who may not like secondary smoke - quite apart from wanting to avoid increasing their risk of getting ill - is another factor.
And some of these issues apply to "gambling" of course. Needs of the many vs. needs of the few etc.
For example some years ago Finland tried to tax soft drinks based on health reasons. The result was that I had to pay that tax for porridge with blueberry soup because the blueberry soup technically filled all the criteria of a soft drink.
Alcohol and tobacco are easy tax, whereas a tax on fast food will always produce some queer results.
I don't know how generous the health care expenditures and retirement programs in other countries are, but I think that it tends to be the case that:
1) Many other countries spend more per capita on their equivalent of Social Security, due to higher life expectancy (which among developed nations, is driven primarily by diet, exercise, and smoking, not health care), lower retirement ages (it's 67 in the United States), and generally more generous welfare programs. I might be wrong about this however.
2) Pretty much all other countries spend less per capita on health care for older people than the US. The US government actually spends more per capita on health care than a lot of countries that have full socialized medicine. The high health care expenditures in the US are driven primarily by an unwillingness to cut off expensive treatments for people who are probably going to die anyway. About 1/3 of health care expenditures in the US are within 6 months of the patient dying. They're secondarily driven by higher drug prices in the US due to the lack of price controls here. Other countries mostly free-ride on the US paying for drug development by imposing price controls or even threats to invalidate patents entirely to prevent drug companies from making much profit on selling the drugs in their country. If the US tried to do likewise, there wouldn't be very much development of new medicines because there wouldn't be money to be made in doing so.
If smoking saves the US government money because the savings from shortened life expectancy outweighs the increased medical costs, then it would probably save most or all other developed countries more money due to reduced medical cost savings and sometimes greater retirement savings from shortened life expectancy.
Taxing based on percentage of calories would make a hamburger that has too much fat, carbohydrates and some proteins healthy because its problem is too much energy in general rather than too much energy in any single form.
If you taxed based on weight or volume of the food, without categories, that would make coke healthy because all drinks contain a lot less energy than foods.
It would be possible to device a taxation that works most of the time, but no matter how you'd do it you'd always have some unintended consequences.
Brenics ~ Just to point out I do believe Chris Roberts is going down as the man who cheated backers and took down crowdfunding for gaming.
A can of Coca-Cola has 39 grams of added sugars, which accounts for basically all of its calories. That's easily going to show up as being unhealthy by even a pretty naive formula.
You mention sodium as making fish look bad, but fish is generally pretty low on sodium if all that you do to cook it is to add heat. If you add a ton of salt as part of how you prepare it, then the sodium problem is that you've added a ton of salt, not that it's fish.
I'm sure that you could come up with examples where simple measures make healthy foods look bad, but you didn't. And a lot of that could be fixed by having a more complicated formula, such as distinguishing between sugar added such as in pop and naturally-occurring sugar such as in fruit, or taking into account the other nutrients that make vegetables healthy in spite of having few calories.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
http://www.mcdonalds.fi/fi/product/hampurilainen.html
Sorry the page is in Finnish. But as you can clearly see, if taxation is based on the percentage of fat compared to other calories then that hamburger is healthy.
You could make that hamburger unhealthy by taxing unsaturated fat. But this bun would still be healthy
https://fineli.fi/fineli/en/elintarvikkeet/33531?q=pullava&foodType=ANY&portionUnit=G&portionSize=100&sortByColumn=name&sortOrder=asc&component=2331&;
Also if you taxed based on amount of fat, both the hamburger and the bun would be healthier than eating this fish:
https://fineli.fi/fineli/en/elintarvikkeet/817?q=lohi&foodType=ANY&portionUnit=G&portionSize=100&sortByColumn=name&sortOrder=asc&component=2331&;
It would have to exceed $300 billion a year to result in any net savings to society, per the CDC: https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/economics/econ_facts/index.htm
Compare that with recorded tobacco revenue in the U.S. per Statista: https://www.statista.com/statistics/248964/revenues-from-tobacco-tax-and-forecast-in-the-us/#0
I've yet to see convincing data showing smokers dying younger is saving the society an extra $280 billion dollars a year.
Any costs you may be speaking of aren't there yet, and likely won't be for decades if we continue to tax cigarettes at the same rate for those decades, if at all.
My search on the internet has shown merely articles quoting folks saying "oh yes, it's definitely a money saver to have smokers!" Light on data, heavy on the "analysis" of said mystical data. I would rather put my money on the CDC.
There are 3 problems I have with Lootboxes.
What I think must happen:
What I would like to see:
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
"I should point out that no other company has shipped out a beta on a disc before this." - Official Mortal Online Lead Community Moderator
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Coined the phrase "Role-Playing a Development Team" January 2018
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But that's uncommon for a variety of reasons, including the laws that you cite. That something would incur serious costs if it happened, but it doesn't happen, is not a serious argument for trying to compensate for those costs that are not incurred.
If the amount of second hand smoke that a non-smoker inhales is about 1% as much as it would be if he smoked, does that still have net negative health consequences? The only scientifically honest answer is that we don't know because if there are any effects at all, they're too small to reliably measure. More generally, small effects are hard to measure because they're mixed in with much larger effects that drown them out. Statistical techniques to try to detect them rely on such strong assumptions as to generally produce garbage.
But yes, you're right that wandering off into cigarettes is far removed from the original discussion.
However, afaik most justice systems has some kind of concept for "intentionally trying to circumvent a law is considered the same as breaking that law". With increasing focus on the problem, it also gets harder and riskier to make clever workarounds, as the risk is ending in court and creating even more awareness from their players.
Not to mention, it is probably too much work to try and create specific workarounds for specific markets, so it may just become cheaper to drop the idea and find other ways.
"I am my connectome" https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HA7GwKXfJB0
Games are supposed to be fair and success in them is not supposed to be related to how much you spend in them. You pay the same amount as other people pay, and thats it, or you don't play. Cosmetic stuff, well that should be separate from success in the game also, but may not be if you are allowed to sell it for in game profit that can benefit you in other ways.
Gambling is about odds, money, and gullibility. The two should not mix.
Most likely, the $300 billion figure consists primarily of costs that are already borne by smokers, such as reduced life expectancy and lower quality of life in a variety of ways. That doesn't justify taxing cigarettes to reimburse the government for costs that the government isn't paying.
The relative costs argument is a very utilitarian one, not a moral one. For example, if we had a policy of executing the day they turned 75 or 5 years after retirement, whichever comes first, that would undeniably save the government a ton of money. But there are also a lot of obvious and compelling reasons why we shouldn't have such a policy, such as that mass murder is evil.
Sometimes adults have to limit their actions so that the world can be kept accessible to children too, and I think this is one of the cases where adults have to ban themselves from gambling like this rather than forbidding minors from entering.