Short Answer: The whys can just be boiled down to gambling, weird investing, flexing wealth, sports fandom stuff, or wanting to invest in your hobby.
Long Answer:
It is a bit of a perfect storm, and you'll get a lot of mixed answers to this, however these are the reasons I see roughly in order of their impact.
1. Skins are the vehicle for gambling (you bet them instead of $). The loot boxes definitely get people hooked, but the skin gambling arena is a whole different beast.
2. Valve, whether by luck or skill, created a perfect system of scarcity. I can elaborate a lot on how this is done. The rarity of the skins is one thing, but the float system giving each drop a mostly unique appearance causes a 2nd tier of scarcity that adds a lot of value. They hired a bigwig Greek economist to develop this system.
3. The market has been stable-ish for long enough that some people view it as a legitimate safe investment. I have heard this is very popular in China, but I really don't know how this behavior is spread out globally. I have a friend with over $100k in the market (well, he did before this).
4. Almost everyone I know who plays seriously has at least invested a small amount in the game. I play with roughly the same 8 people, and 7 of us all spent $1-2k on the game, with inventories ranging from $1-5k.
This hurts a lot for some of us. I am a Creighton fan and this was our first big year in a long time, maybe our best of all time.
Sports fans get accused of forgetting "it is all a game" sometimes. It is certainly more than a game when you think of how much some people's lives depend on the money from these events, but limiting the impact of this virus is certainly not "soft".
I think he is referencing this line in particular.
"Live performers are going to be hard hit economically. Consider supporting their work on Patreon, directly via PayPal, or attend only the smaller shows. Promote them on social media. Buy their work directly."
I do not really agree with removing this line, as it is good advice. I wouldn't be against expanding the content to include other professions, although the single-payer advocacy kind of does that for some of them.
Assuming you can, you should live around the type of community you want. You sound like you want to live in the HOA controlled landscaping suburb, which is great! OP clearly chose to live somewhere where they wouldn't have neighbors saying these sorts of things. They have put thought into a cool experiment that has apparently paid off for them.
Personally, I've never experienced a neighborhood with a strict HOA that I could stand to stick around in. There always seems to be a minority with too much time on their hands playing neighborhood CIA operative and acting like they've just received power for the first time in their lives. I know that might be a little harsh but there always seems to be some variant of this around.
I live in a condo now where those people still exist, but it is so much better. They have much less power and visibility.
When I learned that the game was developed by BYU I decided to play a Mormon spy. I was able to grow my church by building churches in poor areas and aggressive use of missionaries. After I was big enough I declared a holy war on the Jehovah's Witnesses and eventually steal their Mind Control Tech. After buying a major media outlet I was able to use the mind control to take over North America. I demanded the Pope surrender his church to me and Mormonism and the game gave me a victory.
I find it really amazing when a language's weakness drives an unintended strength to evolve like this.
Ruby Example:
Ruby projects tend to always have really well maintained test suites. The language makes it easy for you to introduce non-obvious bugs or write unreadable (yet efficient) meta code.
This has lead to 1) very mature testing frameworks (meh) and 2) high adoption and usage of these frameworks (actually impressive).
Funny enough, I think adoption of IDEs is extremely low in the Ruby world. 90% of the developers I interact with in my city are on Sublime/VSC/Vim. I've seen some pretty impressive usage of Rubymine that has made me curious, but never bothered to really spend time with it myself. I'd be really curious what the teams at GitHub/Stripe/[Insert big Ruby company] typically use editor-wise.
However, it really depends more on what is causing your specific discomfort. For some people it can be the locomotion or just bad visuals. The comfort/heat of the headset also can cause issues. If I don't use VR for awhile, then I get a little nauseous my first 1 or 2 times in, but after that I can handle just about anything for many hours.
Sort of reminds me of a talk Valve gave about creating an anti-cheat for Counter-Strike using AI. When asked if they were worried about people using AI to create cheats to fool the AI, his answer was essentially that it was an arms-race won by the person with more data/processing power. That person would most likely always be Valve.
My initial thought is highly specific human language is actually harder to write than most code, and always more verbose. Well written philosophy comes to mind.
I'd argue that this is part of the reason ORMs gained so much prominence. They solve the problem that SQL introduces by trying to emulate natural language. Most developers will gladly risk sacrificing some specificity of the query in exchange for reducing the verbosity of a SQL query. Obviously if the dev knows their ORM/SQL well, there is no lost precision.
I find the ability to completely "close" my phone really appealing. It feels easier to ignore it, and the screens feel more protected to me.
I can also only describe the second benefit as "its like two monitors". I can watch TV on one and respond to messages/browse on another. I use a Note8+ already, so big screens for watching crap are already my preference though.
This is still one of the reasons I won't buy one of their headsets. Which sucks because the Quest is really cool, at least PC VR has better options/alternatives.
I used ActiveAdmin a lot when I started and it always gave me a headache. From what I have seen of Django Admin (admittedly not a lot) it looks very similar?
I have found that at least for my users, admin type functionality and views generally require a lot of custom work that is not easily turned into convention. About 4 years ago I stopped using Active Admin completely and just started using Ransack + Kaminari gems on their own. I have been a much happier with the way that pattern has worked out.
I find having to actually move to be a pretty engaging part of the game. You have to find resources, and that might be dangerous. Vehicles and concrete help you maneuver more quickly, but have their own risks/drawbacks. Defending your base and setting up an outpost starts out as a manual task until you know how to do it automatically.
In simpler terms, having to do things the slow and manual way makes the fast and automatic solutions even more gratifying.
This is probably the result of poorly labeled training data.
I always get labeled as a dick. It might be because I look like I a mushroom, since I'm just a fun guy.
Quick edit since I just wrote a dumb joke: This actually looks insanely fun and is something I would share with non-tech people if it was hosted somewhere one day.
Spaghetti Squash really surprised me. You need to figure out how to cook it right or else it gets a bit too "wet/oily", but it can really be quite amazing.
He only said it was beyond our understanding "for some unknown amount of time", or that it might end up being too complicated/incompatible with our existence.
His comment wasn't at all about giving up, honestly the exact opposite. It was about avoiding/managing the disturbed/dreadful feelings that commonly accompany the thoughts and work in this domain.
Long Answer: It is a bit of a perfect storm, and you'll get a lot of mixed answers to this, however these are the reasons I see roughly in order of their impact.
1. Skins are the vehicle for gambling (you bet them instead of $). The loot boxes definitely get people hooked, but the skin gambling arena is a whole different beast.
2. Valve, whether by luck or skill, created a perfect system of scarcity. I can elaborate a lot on how this is done. The rarity of the skins is one thing, but the float system giving each drop a mostly unique appearance causes a 2nd tier of scarcity that adds a lot of value. They hired a bigwig Greek economist to develop this system.
3. The market has been stable-ish for long enough that some people view it as a legitimate safe investment. I have heard this is very popular in China, but I really don't know how this behavior is spread out globally. I have a friend with over $100k in the market (well, he did before this).
4. Almost everyone I know who plays seriously has at least invested a small amount in the game. I play with roughly the same 8 people, and 7 of us all spent $1-2k on the game, with inventories ranging from $1-5k.