I remembered seeing this game as a kid, but the name sounded off... And Wikipedia reveals it was released in North America (NTSC format) as "Shipwreckers!"[1]. It also featured 5-player local multiplayer if you had multitap, according to the article, and I remember most other games of the era supporting at most 4 players locally. I'll have to find this one and give it a try!
There are two split-keyboards made by Ultimate Hacking Keyboard [1], UHK 60 and UHK 80, that have an optional trackpoint or trackball module. They're not cheap, though.
I've met plenty of people who want to make products that solve problems, even if the product's user only has those problems once in a while. Reaching for a well-liked, well-matched tool whenever a problem arises isn't addicted or quasi-addicted or "as though" addicted behavior.
Once you're thinking about how to keep a user coming back, you're in the mutually adversarial design space, whatever language is used to more pleasantly redecorate that reality.
You can't be a good designer if you aren't thinking about how to get your users to love your product so much that they keep coming back. There are good and bad ways to keep users coming back. The good way is to simply make the product very useful. The bad way is to make the user psychologically dependent on your product in some way.
Yet almost everyone uses dark patterns, which imply they don't think their product is good enough for users to return on their own volition. In fact, I can't think of a single for-profit company that doesn't use at least one dark pattern.
I can think of one such company. Full disclosure: I work for them. It's a successful startup where the entire retention strategy is for our product to be so freaking amazing you'll never want to use anything else. It's been working very well so far. But our product really is freaking amazing.
Since I posted I thought of another one (assuming you don't work for them). But, they really are rare. I see dark patterns everywhere, so I have a visceral reaction to any claims that companies respect users.
One factor I never see anyone talking about is that, for Framework laptops, the webcam is easily physically removable and the laptop will continue to function without it.
That's the reason Framework is one of the only laptops I'll ever recommend to parents who ask about devices for children under the age of 15-16. No Internet-connected computing device before that age with an integrated, un-removable webcam. Sorry... You either know people who've been hurt by online manipulation or you don't, and the harm it's possible to do is much worse when a webcam is involved.
Especially when parents aren't particularly computer savvy, kids should either have a mobile device without a camera or a desktop computer placed in a public part of the home. I know why most manufacturers don't make devices without integrated webcams anymore, but it really shouldn't be an auto-add feature to a mobile computer.
> getting a tantalising glimpse of what might be possible if only you weren't so timid/proper/responsible/considerate/whatever.
I think that glimpse is only tantalizing, and Kerouac's types only magnetic, when the reader lacks a well developed theory of mind for other humans and only obeys laws and social conventions for fear of punishment and ostracism. If you can empathize with others, shedding that capacity is more a strange nightmare than it is desirable. On the other hand, if you are fearful of social and legal consequences, freedom from that fear is absolutely a seductive fantasy.
With cars, networked computers are encroaching on privacy from two sides: the computers inside the car sharing sensor data and the computers outside the car sharing camera data from known points on the road.
Older cars may not have cellular data, and some new cars (e.g. the Slate electric car) may be specifically designed without cellular connections or with easily removable chips, but so much can still be inferred from omnipresent roadside surveillance.
It's not enough even to have private cars. The solution must be legislation that limits all of: data collected by cars and cameras, data shared among third parties, and placement of cameras without informed, specific, continuing public consent.
And every time flock-style cameras "could have" done some good, the surveillance state's cheerleaders will beat their drums and bleat their demands.
> The solution must be legislation that limits all of: data collected
Let's finish the sentence there. Being spied by corporations 24/7 while we game, watch entertainment, drive, talk with friends, work... it's fucked up.
We live in a hell of our own creation and only new legislation and regulations can get us out of here.
It's also akin to Roko's basilisk's - the people who don't realise how pervasive and invasive it has become seem the happiest while the ones like us who've often been around computers since the 80's and just watched our society sleep walk into it feel the worst.
That many of us then end up working for the companies doing it makes for a bad feeling across the industry.
You’re sort of describing the central problem of my existence: the skills I have to offer in the marketplace of work are only skills utilized by people whose goals I abhor.
I got into this because I loved solving problems. Now my problem is that the problems at hand are mostly dehumanizing and further the goals of people intent on dehumanizing everyone but them.
I leaned my ladder against the wrong wall and started climbing. It took a lifetime to realize it was the wrong wall.
Except unlike Roko's basilisk, this is not absurd pseudo-game-theory extrapolation based on the hypothetical existence of a supreme superintelligence that is simultaneously infinitely vengeful, infinitely omniscient, and infintely omnimpotent; instead it's just the same authoritarian corporate-backed police-state privacy encroachment that has been tightening around our throats for years.
You're asking for new legislation written by governments that a/ want that data to spy on you too and b/ are lobbied by corporations to write the legislation corps want.
It's a closed loop of crap, that goes in one direction only.
No worries, next generation won't even understand what we are blabbing about. Look at that cute cat video! Privacy what? Oh that puppy is rolling on his back!
Once your intergenerational wealth is offshore you can pick any of your nepo offspring and make them a hollywood star or unicorn startup CEO with a clean wikipedia page. Their wealth is also tied to national security jobs, because those make you immune in front of the law plus you have the benefit of constructing identities (and death certificates) out of thin air.
For example very rich people in the US receive vanity SSNs. Ghislaine Maxwell has one that spells out "Leet Babe". It's like number plates to show off.
“Leet Babe” is not even the right number of letters. Doesn’t seem like “leet” would even be in her generation’s vocabulary. Are you trolling? Very rich get vanity numbers? Where is there evidence of that?
Bothered to check it? It's not literally the letters "leet babe", it's in "leetspeak" as the parent said:
"Ghislaine Maxwell's Social Security Number (133-78-4883) is recorded in U.S. law enforcement documents, such as historical NYPD files, as part of her official identification and background records".
1337 84883 --> LEET BABBE in leetspeak.
It's a stretch, but to be fair, apparently they already had no problem getting visas and other documents with 3-4 variations of their names (to make database lookup more difficult)
I did check but did not find the reference. What exactly are you quoting? I do not see that in any of the parent comments. I also doubt Maxwell was well versed in leetspeak. She was a career socialite.
Getting visas and documents under different names is not anything other than garden variety use of aliases. All kinds of people who are not mega-wealthy do this, legally and illegally. I am specifically questioning the ability of ultra-wealthy choosing SSNs. I had never previously seen this assertion.
> I did check but did not find the reference. What exactly are you quoting?
I mean man, I didn't ask you to search for my verbatim quote (it's an one-off llm answer). Search for her SSN. You can google it, it's here on the first page under "'Application Info" for example:
I genuinely gave you the benefit of the doubt. I used duck duck go and searched several combinations of related terms and also asked chat gpt, “man”. And found nothing. Why would you quoting an “one-off llm answer” as a fact remotely be responsible? We all know how reliable that is. Why would you not cite your source in the first place “man”? This is straight up conspiracy theory BS but I wanted to understand where you were coming from and give it the benefit of the doubt. Nobody is changing their SSN to a vanity SSN and you know it.
She is British citizen and received the vanity SSN with her first H1B visa application which was done through one of Epstein's companies. Her family was involved with the software for identity management.
That's exactly it. There was a time before widespread fingerprint checks and facial recognition where they'd all been swapping their first/middle/lastnames around like crazy between passports, and for GM we have the actual immigration documents she filled out with the clear intention to fool the government - for each government entity she sent the form to, she used a different name. She was working in NY without a visa, and after Bush was voted out there was a sudden scrambling to get her an H1B and it was done via one of Epstein's companies.
The vanity SSN thing looks even weirder because someone who I assume was Epstein's great-grandfather was head of US social security administration in the 1920s, a crazy coincidence [Trump family was more department of agriculture]. The 133784883 SSN is clearly a five-eyes meme and one day FOIAs will show what other interesting VIPs have a 1337-range SSN.
Even Donald Trump's officially-curated Wikipedia lists some of his fake identities, and he has some Epstein-related pseudonyms which are not widely known yet which are miraculously also associated with the Kashoggi family name.
As alluded to, it doesn't have to :) The French are currently on their fifth iteration of "the government", and we're bound to get a new iteration hopefully soon! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Fifth_Republic
Most of the governments you are talking about are voted on by the people. And when the people care, the governments change. When the people don't care, yes, the government does want lots of data. However, people do often care about such things and that limits the government.
The vast majority of Americans are not working 100 hours a week just trying to get enough for the basics (goodwill clothing, food, and a shelter...). They might be living paycheck to paycheck, but it is with 40-60 hour per week job, and the are living paycheck to paycheck because they spend money when they make it (this is a sensible thing to do with most of your money - though having some emergency and retirement savings is a good idea, for most people the risk of death before they get old is too high to make saving much more sensible.).
Which is to say the vast majority have plenty of time to think about politics. They don't but that is because they choose to do other things, not because they lack time. (even those who do take the time often only think about it superficially)
Not sure how your comment relates to the one it is replying to except to appear to reject its argument in favor of another train of thought. Politics is playdoh. Tax the bots for UBI.
>Most of the governments you are talking about are voted on by the people. And when the people care, the governments change.
People have been getting the opposite of what they explicitly vote for, for ages...
Just some recent examples:
In Europe an example is the popular sentiment against further unckecked immigration for example, and people voting politicians promising against that, and getting more.
Or how in the US how people voted someone promising no new wars, talking against foreign interventionist policy and so on, and see what they got.
Voted on by the people, and yet in 2026 we have no way to actually confirm our votes are counted or factored into who gets elected. Every single US president is related, sans Van Buren, but there's no way our elections are rigged! Not sure how many corrupt politicians have to take office before people will start questioning the legitimacy of elections.
Unemployed revolutionaries are a lot cheaper than responsible senators, and as history shows, selling claims to territories that belong to others is exactly what makes state violence so profitable. The descendants of someone in Africa are glad their photographs and souls weren’t taken a century ago.
Those few decades where the normal person thought that they are not a servant to a feudalistic lord are over, the aristocrats don't need to hide any more. The old money is out in the open, because the populace has lost all their leverage.
They still lie to us about the true source of their wealth, but if you dig in the few archives that we can actually access it is clear that the same family names pop up over and over again.
If your family wealth came from feudalism/colonialism and was already safely stored in offshore accounts 100 years ago, you can send your nepo child to silicon valley or Hollywood, have your connections invest into them and tell the whole world what amazing self-made person they are. Some years down the line they go meet the King to get their hereditary Lordship title back for the whole world to know.
All of this is in the national security interest, so your kids are above the law even though they might only be a Hollywood talent scout, CEO of some startup or a real estate mogul focused on black neighborhoods.
For several hundred years being aristocrat was really unpopular, but ultimately they got a grip on it by owning all means of mass propaganda plus building a file on everyone.
I wish people would stop saying we created this hell, as if everyone had a choice as to whether or not they grew up in this increasingly dystopian reality. Blame the people that are actually to blame, not everyone else. It's a tired tactic to shift blame from those who are actually accountable for these systems and technologies.
>Well not "our" creation since only a few oligarchs control most of the companies that engage in this
Do not excuse the millions upon millions of useful idiots who lent credence to the "rulers" stupid projects at every step of the way. A lot of this problem is in the mirror. Those oligarchs would have infinity less power if a whole bunch of people din't agree with them.
I mean hell, go look at HN comments from before Flock was helping ICE and every idiot in the comments cooing about how to optimize the ALPR dragnet to fine speeders, flag drug dealers and apply jackboot to every other class of petty deviant they thought they could tease out and everyone pushing back was being shat on for not being "pro social" enough or whatever.
A meaningful amount of the problem is viewable in the goddamn mirror.
Now that we know how positive reinforcement works, and why negative doesn’t, we can be more deliberate and hence more successful, in our cultural design. We can achieve a sort of control under which the controlled… nevertheless feel free. They are doing what they want to do, not what they are forced to do. That’s the source of the tremendous power of positive reinforcement—there’s no restraint and no revolt. By a careful design, we control not the final behavior, but the inclination to behave—the motives, the desires, the wishes. The curious thing is that in that case the question of freedom never arises.
I constantly learn the hard way in politics that unintended consequences dominate long term. Often they are things that seem obvious in hindsight but nobody reasonable thought of in advance (the people that did are unreasonable in other ways and generally right to ignore even though they were right this time)
>Well not "our" creation since only a few oligarchs control most of the companies that engage in this.
They're just looking after their interests and kinks. It's the suckers that accept it, which are hundreds of millions, that allow this hell to be created, and continue to not do anything about it, when they're not even supporting and voting for them.
I guess my point was - you're one of the people you're complaining about if you're not revolting yourself. I also am not of the opinion that violent revolution would fix anything for the better, but that's not really relevant.
I think the only problem may be how it's phrased. I don't mind technology checking if I'm alive and awake while operating a two tonne ballistic bullet in publicml.
I do mind, however, if the data is not immediately discarded, once it does its real-time safety purpose.
Just because it's a camera based system doesn't mean it will be surveillance.
Except in mid to high end luxury cars, automakers will probably design the sensor to be completely self-contained and merely provide a "driver present, attentive" or "driver distracted" or "no driver." In high end cars they'll use it to switch driver profiles, like what Lucid already does.
Both you and that author need to go look at the massive amount of data that has been getting collected in cars, including location data, for close to two decades in any vehicle that even had the option for telematics and GPS navigation.
Also the issue is not so much the camera system, but the "OS" the car is running. A ton of vehicles now have Google's Android OS running on them and that is also a privacy dumpster fire in and of itsel.
Also, a nationwide network of license plate reading cameras is far more of a privacy threat, too.
You can do that just be aware that you will eventually be spending more than just buying a new car just to keep the current one in good repair. Car collectors get around this because they use have a different car as the daily driver, and their collected car is repaired and only used in parades and such.
You are also turning away a lot of the advances in electric vehicles. Paying for gas in your old car, could be more than payments on a brand new electric car. (that would require a lot of driving.)
$24K buys you an astonishing amount of maintenance! Unless you're talking doing a restoration on a collectible car, it's basically impossible to spend that much.
I like old cars so I know. I drive one car from the 70s, one from the 80s, two from the 90s, one from the 00s and one from 2010s (pre-screen era). All those cars put together I haven't spent $20K in maintenance over the last decade.
If a new car makes you happy and you can afford the depreciation, get one. But if the criteria is saving money, get an old car and maintain it forever.
Car collectors are not the same thing as drivers of old cars. Collectors don't want to put miles on their collectables because they want the cars to maintain (or increase) their value. It's not a question of cost. Older cars are simpler, particularly pre-electronic ignition, and easier to repair.
Just as a random example, you can get a rebuilt automatic transmission for a '69 Ford Mustang for about $350 on ebay. The cheapest transmission (not rebuilt, just taken from a wreck) you'll find for a 2020 Mustang is about $540.
Parts availability can be a problem, but especially if you drive a once popular model and are willing to do work yourself, the mileage you can get out of junkyard parts is significant.
Are they though? Have there been any major breakthroughs in the engineering that make a 2026 car more structurally secure than one from 2011? I thought the main improvements were made in software, like lane assist and whatever else. But my assumption is that you need to go back considerably more than 15 years ago to see vehicles that are meaningfully less structurally safe.
> The solution must be legislation that limits all of: data collected by cars and cameras, data shared among third parties, and placement of cameras without informed, specific, continuing public consent.
Americans will give away any and all material and immaterial rights to validate their illusion of comfort and security. This will not happen barring a complete audit/revamp of the state
Becoming the state means getting power. Very few people are strong enough to not be corrupted by this power, and to argue against themselves, or their function, or the powerful people around them having so much of this power or more of it.
Normal people give it up because they are permanently under assault by misinformation, misdirection, lack of education, artificial threats, all meant to guide them towards a conclusion that was already predetermined for them.
It is scary to think how cheap this tech is getting, so semi-expensive things like fridges and TVs will start to come with built-in mobile connections and be always online even if you don't connect them.
With mesh networks it is even scarier, I wouldn't be surprised that at some point even if you don't connect a device like a smart lamp, it might still be sending data about its usage using your neighbors hub.
> It's not enough even to have private cars. The solution must be legislation
Regarding the importance of legislation versus "just don't buy those", I think this piece [0] seems relevant. To summarize the argument:
1. Consumer choices are never enough to really change things. It's a false promise, one the people making the decisions are happy to let you believe.
2. If you do believe that "voting with your wallet" works, then when things inevitably fail to change it leads you to blame others for "not doing their part" and being insufficiently picky or not denying their own desires.
3. Ultimately this means: (A) No policy change; (B) You spend a lot of time denying yourself nice things; (C) It creates division between people who have the same goals; (D) Your experience is frustrating bickering and purity-tests.
4. Instead you should pursue real politics. While you can't do it alone with a computer, it offers: (A) Real results; (B) No self-sabotage when you truly need a product; (C) You gain allies; (D) You experience comradery and excitement.
5. Voting with your wallet hasn't worked so far. Why limit yourself to a tactic that is proven ineffective? Corporations don't limit themselves this way - they lobby and obfuscate and sometimes outright lie [1].
6. Regulation is how citizens organize. Corporations don't rely on employees just voluntarily doing what benefits the corporation - they fire them if they don't. "Vote with your wallet" means to throw away your rights and duties as a citizen, and retain only the meager powers of a consumer.
The best argument against "voting with your wallet" I heard was following: billionaires have much bigger wallets. They will outvote the rest of us every single time voting with wallet is used as political strategy.
Well, billionaires do have bigger wallets. The common person as a collection has bigger wallets than the billionaires. Remember, too, that the billionaires are not a 100% alignment on everything.
> The common person as a collection has bigger wallets than the billionaires.
They don't. And remember, the billionaire has 100% alignment on everything with himself and that gives him huge power when voting with a valet. A collection of "common people" is a true collection of people with very different priorities and needs.
There was a HN user recently on a related post explaining to everyone that they don't need privacy because they personally aren't harmed and a murderer was caught by one of these cameras.
It turns out protesters don't need privacy, either, because of various reasons. Same for women seeking adequate healthcare, I'm sure. Or LGBT people attempting to exist.
Sorry, I am strawmanning a little. Actually, we'll simply have regulations on use. Regulation which will certainly be followed this time by a government with complete disregard for Constitutional rights. Certainly they will never be misused by the police currently stalking their ex-partners with existing surveillance systems despite existing stalking legislation.
I wish the legislation you talked about existed already. I am dismayed by the overwhelming number of people that love being surveilled. Without them, we would have it already.
Sadly, often once some new degree of connection becomes possible, its absence is very quickly seen as unconscionable. But that instinct is corrosive to human flourishing and freedom in the long term.
Once it's possible to monitor your children via networked phone or wristwatch and know at all times where they are, for example, if you do not spy on your own children then other parents who do will look at you askance, seeing you as neglectful. Some will call the authories to complain. Those same complainers will also wonder why so many children are no longer becoming effective, independent adults, with no introspection.
The same philisophical problem emerges independent of surveillance with most, if not all, new technology. Once everyone is genetically engineering children, bringing children into the world naturally will set them up for failure and serfdom (a la Gattaca).
In response to someone in another thread who argued against personal privacy, who said "Why do people feel they can behave in a way that can be blackmailed", I responded with the following:
---
Yeah, how dare someone do or say anything that some random crazy asshole could use to threaten that person's personal or professional life or even put them in danger of physical harm.
To hell with gay kids growing up in very traditional religious areas in much of the world.
That person who made a racist joke on Discord when they were 13 years old? That should be able to ruin them when they're 30!
Someone confiding to a friend over social media DMs that they're in an abusive relationship with someone violent? Well - she shouldn't be surprised when her partner beats her within an inch of her life when he finds out. If only she did what she was told, right?
And let's not forget the cringiest or most sexual thing you've ever said online - make sure that your every utterance in private would pass scrutiny by your employer's HR department!
Seriously...I don't understand people like you. What a small, listless, and unusually safe world you must live in.
You may as well have asked why can't everyone think and act like you as well as live in your particular region of the world with the same friends, family, romantic, and professional opportunities that you've been provided throughout your life.
"That person who made a racist joke on Discord when they were 13 years old? That should be able to ruin them when they're 30!"
Or society could move on and accept that people progress. Also I am not aware of any instances where 30 year olds were punished for a racist joke they made with 13.
The only instance I remotely know, is of a german politician, who made a deeply racist and neonazi pamphlet when he was 17 - and the result was some public outcry but nothing else.
Still privacy is important, simply because those who do surveillance are not trustworthy either.
In the 2010's, there was an instance of a late-teens/early-20's girl targeted by a group of too-online people for a racist chat log made when she was around 12 or 13 years old. The people went after her dad's business too because of his association with her.
Aside from getting her fired from her job, they also tried to destroy her dad's business.
I get that less-than-10 years isn't a ton of time, but it also represented nearly half her life. People tend to grow up a lot in their teens even if it's still common for there to be some immaturity leftover in their early 20's
Lynch mobs usually ain't fair or just or busy with factfinding, but I know there are also a lot of people hiding behind a mask and do not like to get exposed by confronting them with something out of a time when they were not so careful yet.
Personally I just avoid racists (or argue with them) and don't attack their stuff or even family and don't think this is the way, to get to a world without or even less racism.
The end state is something like China, where petty street level crime is essentially solved. You can leave your bike unlocked because if anyone stole it the police would find them and return it since they can track the thief on a network of cameras.
But like you say, many things which have been crimes were based on unethical laws. It's easy to two sides this issue, less crime would on a whole be a good thing but some level of committing crime and getting away with it is required for society to progress.
> You can leave your bike unlocked because if anyone stole it the police would find them and return it since they can track the thief on a network of cameras.
In the US it is actually even worse than that.
The government and large corporations (basically the same people owning it all) will spy on you 24x7 for anything that they dislike you doing.
But if your bike (car, etc) is stolen right in front of many cameras providing video evidence, police will not do anything about it.
I know first hand people who have crystal clear video evidence of theft, gave it to the police, and they just don't care to do anything about it.
> The end state is something like China, where petty street level crime is essentially solved.
PRC netizens, and who knows what percentage of them are real but presumably more than 0, will defend this when I talk with them about it. How the surveillance makes them feel safe, how they wouldn't feel safe without it.
Hm, maybe, I'd prefer the person looking over me while I slept to be someone I know, but I guess everyone knows brother Xi. Regardless, the implication seems to be that we need the requisite police state to go with it, when Taiwan and Japan both have basically total CCTV coverage as well, yet are liberal democracies. Both countries are also comparably safe to the PRC. So there certainly seems to be some middle ground. I don't know about Japan, but I've not heard of issues of private companies exploiting the CCTV for profiteering purposes, or like, cops using it to stalk people, or the government using it to engage in civic oppression (post constitutional reforms).
I think we just need sensible levels of surveillance with proper safe guards. I'm quite happy with a network of CCTV that can track down the driver who just bulldosed and killed a kid on the their bike. I'm not ok with Amazon building their own network of spying doorbell cameras to sell adverts.
> The end state is something like China, where petty street level crime is essentially solved.
Petty crime in China was also "essentially solved" before there were cameras anywhere.
> You can leave your bike unlocked because if anyone stole it the police would find them and return it since they can track the thief on a network of cameras.
Leaving my bike unlocked in Shanghai 10+ years ago, it was stolen about once every one or two months. That's better than the US, but it's not exactly economical.
The modern solution is that you don't own a bike. You use the rental bikes instead. They're not as good as the bike you'd own, but if they get stolen it's not your problem. (And they have trackers installed, so it's not much of a problem for the rental company either.)
Using a very lightweight lock for the frame and ideally having a saddle and wheels that can't come off without tools would change things economically, especially if the bike is cheap but good enough.
The issue is having to rely on luck and the fact that humans are risk and loss aversive even when the risk is worth it.
"Leaving my bike unlocked in Shanghai 10+ years ago, it was stolen about once every one or two months."
Seriously? How many times until you started locking it up?
China is an ethnically and culturally homogeneous society, with their ethnic minorities being about as different from the Han majority as the Czechs are different from the Slovaks. if China was to experience Western levels of diversity, inclusion, and cultural enrichment, then no amount of surveillance could possibly help prevent crimes, petty and otherwise. just look at the UK.
"then no amount of surveillance could possibly help prevent crimes, petty and otherwise. just look at the UK."
I don't understand your argument. Are you suggesting surveillance cameras are somehow less effective in diverse societies? Are you claiming UK has as effective a surveillance network as China?
>Are you claiming UK has as effective a surveillance network as China?
a more effective one.
>Are you suggesting surveillance cameras are somehow less effective in diverse societies?
I'm suggesting that certain cultures are less risk and conflict averse, to put it in the most politically correct way possible, and are less disincentivized from committing crimes by the possibility of brief imprisonment.
> With cars, networked computers are encroaching on privacy from two sides: the computers inside the car sharing sensor data and the computers outside the car sharing camera data from known points on the road.
My brother and I made up a version of Magic as kids where all the mana is laid out sideways in staggered rows between the players, creating a sort of hex grid landscape. You drew and played from your deck, but placed cards on the "map" created by the mana on the board, only where the adjacent mana matched their cost, and moved around attacking each other. Six adjacencies meant cards could cost up to seven and work in the format.
It was great fun, and also completely unbalanced. Once you knew your opponent's powerful card, it focused battles around the intersections where they could spawn. I've heard of other people doing similar things, but never an official format that used mana as a landscape game board.
We mostly did it that way because we didn't know the actual rules, which I recall being widely true of both Magic and Pokémon among kids who collected the cards in the 2000s.
Interesting. I've been kicking around the idea of designing a similar game (probably in computer format tbh), specifically with the idea of mana being geographically located in a hex grid.
Any ideas for a more balanced version, or other thoughts about it? I'm sure I'm not the only one who would be curious to hear more details.
It was mostly unbalanced because Magic: The Gathering wasn't designed with movement, range, or position in mind. So there were all kinds of effects interactions that didn't make sense and we always had to rule things on the fly. And there were definitely arguments about which cards should be faster or slower.
Other games to look at include the Undaunted [1] series by Osprey Games:
- They use deckbuilding-esque mechanics to simulate squad level combat in WWII.
- They also have staggered tiles creating a hex-like board. When I first saw undaunted I thought, "oh, I did that years ago with Mana cards!"
- There are little punch out tokens representing the cards in your deck. Who you have in your hand each turn represents who you can give orders to on the board.
It's BoardGameGeek's aggregation of all the games in the Undaunted series. You have to click on the specific games (e.g. Undaunted: Normandy or Undaunted: Battle of Britain) to get the detailed info on each.
You might be interested in the relatively new TCG Sorcery: Contested Realm. It’s a a game that plays lands to a grid and creatures on the lands, somewhat like the game you invented. Also has an artistic direction reminiscent of 90s era magic.
Too true. The idea that you could play instants during your opponents turn caused many a disagreement, especially over combat timings or unintuitive but real mechanics like “stack combat damage, sac mogg fanatic”
Graphene OS only supports devices for as long as the manufacturer is providing security updates for the phone's firmware. Firmware is binary blob, so there'd be no practical way for anyone else to provide/develop security updates once the manufacturer is no longer providing official updates.
Their partnership with Motorola, I think, involves some ability of Graphene OS devs to access/harden/update the firmware, but I'm not 100% sure. Firmware on phones, especially for the baseband processor, often involves a nasty confluence of copyright, trade secrets, patents, and government rules/demands.
It can be done, fairphone rather famously did it once.
But it is vastly uneconomical, and I doubt anyone is going to start doing it regularly.
We really need some kind of regulation demanding firmware support for longer. The EU seems the most likely entity to achieve something like that. Phone vendors can't even control how long they support their own hardware, because the SoC is almost always Qualcomm, and once they drop support, there aren't any good options left.
> It can be done, fairphone rather famously did it once.
No, they ported a new major Android release beyond what the SoC officially supported. They had already stopped providing firmware, kernel or driver security patches long before that point. They did what LineageOS regularly does by porting a new major Android release to hardware not officially supporting it. Unlike LineageOS, they had to convince a company to certify it as meeting the CDD/CTS requirements. Most OEMs including Fairphone have major CDD/CTS violations but yet still get certified in practice so that doesn't really mean as much as you'd think. It's common for Android OEMs to break functionality tested by the CTS and yet somehow they have certification. This is part of why the Play Integrity API's flimsy justification for the highly anti-competitive approach it uses is such nonsense.
Even the Fairphone 5 already lacks standard Linux kernel security patches due to having an end-of-life kernel branch. Fairphone doesn't provide anything close to proper updates.
Qualcomm offers up to 8 years of major Android version updates and basic security patches for their firmware and drivers. They charge money for each year of support. It's there if OEMs are willing to pay for an up-to-date SoC and pay for many years of support.
The way it shakes out is that there's no widely accessible way of escaping actual, ongoing work, which is what unmotivated people actually hear behind the words "passive income." Whatever the industry/vertical/field, a tiny number will hit it so big that they can actually stop working. Everyone else can bolster their income with passive sources, but that passive income ultimately depends on continuing new stimulus into the market (new products/services, more work marketing) to keep the "passive" flow stable.
If you look at the world of indie tabletop RPGs, for example: Kevin Crawford of Sine Nomine Press makes a very good living and a significant percentage of it is "passive" sales of his back catalog. But if he stopped publishing and promoting new game projects, sales of that back catalog would very likely shrivel to nothing within a calendar year.
The open-secret ingredient is always more work.
It's why someone like Crawford can afford to tell everyone exactly how he does what he does... Giving away extensive production files that show you his whole creative process, soup to nuts: 99% of people aren't going to put in the work necessary to sustain the passive portion of an individual income.
The way to escape is through consistent, long term investing in the stock market. You get a regular job and live below your means, investing the difference. Buy and hold. Invest regularly. Not day trading, long term. The problem is most people don’t have the patience, the right temperament, to do this.
This is not what people mean by passive income. Yeah, if you have a few million dollars of capital already you can easily just toss it in the market and collect 4% every year indefinitely. Pretty much one of the only truly passive income streams there is.
The problem is how long and what you have to do to get that 3-5 million number. No one who is drawn to the “passive income” hustle is thinking “work a normal job for 30 years, live under my means, and invest everything I can”. They want to get much more immediate results so they can enjoy life on easy street because grinding it out for so long sounds extremely depressing.
What you describe is a retirement plan, not a passive income lifestyle. Kinda the opposite of escaping.
This is literally the traditional definition of passive income - using your capital to generate more capital.
There is no free lunch, you need to provide something to get $$$. If you are providing labour it is by definition not really passive. That leaves land or capital.
The point is though, that no one pitches it this way. Everyone knows if you have millions of dollars you can generate passive income. That's simply not interesting to anyone.
If you have to grind out making millions over the course of a decade or three, that's simply called having a regular job. That's the status quo.
The passive income folk are all about finding some "hack" where you can be clever or smart or out-hustle the next guy and unlock some secret method to making passive income without capital. That's the entire "industry" in a nutshell. They are not going to folks with $1m in the bank telling them how to make 4% returns on it by tossing it into low cost ETFs. They are going to folks grinding out a living saying they have a shortcut to not needing that capital base to start off with.
tldr; If you already have capital, you don't need to think about passive income. It just happens.
‘everyone knows’ is doing a lot of work here. you still need to spend time, and make a lot of good judgement calls (not easy!) to earn a useful amount of passive income on investments without losing your principal.
being a professional investor (what you’re referring to) is especially terrifying in a low interest rate environment.
You don't need millions - if things go modestly well and you have a high savings rate, you can get out in 5-10 and draw enough to cover modest means. I do agree that people eying passive income maybe have a different patience / willingness to sacrifice & self-teach threshold but the calculus of grinding for a few years to escape has its adherents.
Yup. This was my approach. Left my business a decade ago with low six figures cash in my pocket. It would have lasted about 18 months at my existing burn rate.
So I moved to a cabin in the woods in a country with a low cost of living, and stuck pretty much all of it in the markets.
Had I not done that, I would have had to go back to work - instead I lived a modest life (€500/mo, max) off the income from putting my apartment on Airbnb, and regained my sanity after a decade of relentless work while my investments did their thing.
Anyway, it’s a decade on, still haven’t done a jot of “work”, and the assets are now worth several million, and are being redeployed to continue to maximise value growth - and we now treat ourselves to spending months travelling at exorbitant budgets, real estate, expensive toys - and had enough stability to decide to have a kid.
So yeah, it’s possible - although had we grown at 6%/yr rather than an average of 80%/yr, it would be a different picture - but I firmly believe there are plenty of other opportunities for rapid capital growth elsewhere in the markets, and yet to come. I’m just some average dude who buys equities on vibes and then sits on them for a decade. If I of all people managed it, others can.
Way to bury the lede. Being able to average 80%/yr returns takes talent and skill and is a type of work. The type of work, by the way, that is rewarded with millions at finance companies in NYC, or even more if you launch your own trading shop.
I’d sooner eat crow than work for a living again - and this ain’t work. I just think while I’m out for a hike, driving, whatever, and decide to make some investments in X, Y, Z next time there’s a decent looking moment to realise and reallocate some profits.
Plus, the kind of investing I do would never fly in a hedge fund - I’d just make the risk desk piss itself with laughter.
Nope. I just think about the probable shape of the future, and who benefits.
I stick with the fields I know and understand - tech, engineering, sciences - don’t go for long bets so much as “if this relatively predictable set of circumstances arises, who will inevitably benefit”.
For example, in 2017 I was keeping abreast with ML research, and realised that within a decade this stuff was going to be huge - so I bought Nvidia and their supply chain and sat on it. Also Tesla as I figured as if I saw them as an adjacent incumbent beneficiary of an AI boom, then others would, too.
I’ve followed that chain of logic through - caught the nuclear renaissance in its entirety, as well as predictable resource squeezes.
So - that’s just one of my trees of bets - but my whole thesis is “predict a future, model out what that looks like, place bets accordingly”.
Passive income through assets is the basis of our entire society, trying to out earn the base line is the entire economy. Banks wouldnt lend, employers would do something else, if they didnt believe they could earn more doing what they do, instead of owning US treasuries or earning dividends from stocks.
As a counterpoint, I have a website that generates a few thousand dollars per month and sometimes I improve bits about it but sometimes I also don't touch it (or its emails or anything) for a year.
Not just one word though. Also hard work and grit. Telling someone interested in escaping the rat race (who is not in the top 10% of income earners) to just stick with a job they despise for 15-25 years is just not going to hit home. They know they can grind out a miserable life. That's the status quo they currently live.
Sure there are the scammer/grifter types who just want a super easy mode get rich quick scheme, but a lot of these folks are somewhere in the middle which is where they get taken by the actual scammers. They get told if they just hustle harder than everyone else for a few years they can achieve escape velocity.
It is good to encourage people to save money and invest them, but 8 out of 10 people out there don't earn enough to gather so much capital to live off it.
In general, you are right, but many people on this site do earn enough. Engineers have some of the highest paying "normal person" jobs out there. If we can't save and invest for the future, who can?
Agreed. And if more high income professionals pursued this path, it would tip the balance of power in the workforce away from employers. That's a win for all except those at the top.
> The way it shakes out is that there's no widely accessible way of escaping actual, ongoing work, which is what unmotivated people actually hear behind the words "passive income."
25x expenses in s&p 500 works ok. (Adjust the multiplier for your level of pessimism) Funding it isn't easy, but save a good amount of your income for a few decades and control your expenses and you can get there.
I generally agree, but that basically sounds like prudent investing for eventual retirement. Yes, tune the degree of aggression both in terms of work input and spending restraint, but the "work input" has to be high (and effective) for those few decades.
EDIT: I'm also kind of writing in the context of having your own little economic engine that you own and control, and can be continually running, rather than owning a tiny piece of the abstracted aggregation of an entire economy's engines. That said, dead-simple, low-fee, market-indexed funds are a generally good place to put the surplus fruits of your own little economic engine.
The difference is, in retirement, you're maintaining an awareness of your own end of life and it's okay if your net worth goes down YoY as long as it doesn't do so too fast.
Creating an additional 30%-50% on top of whatever a normal person would consider passive income in order to actually have passive income is NOT a realistic option for a huge % of the population.
The key is living below your means by ~30%. You make 150k? Live like you make 100k. Every time you get a raise, 30% goes towards investing. For most engineers this is achievable.
Everyone getting income passively is not going to work for society in general. Work still needs to happen. Until we live in a post-scarsity society, if nobody works then everything collapses.
That's not to say that passive income is impossible, its just not going to work if large swaths of the population are doing it.
I think mutual aid organizations and friendly societies of various kinds among American immigrants (at least historically) benefited from a strong selection effect: people willing to immigrate to a faraway country without a welfare system in pursuit of opportunity and wealth. That population is highly self-selected for work ethic, risk tolerance, and self-discipline. Those values probably stabilize social dynamics and minimize the wealth immolation and tall-poppy effects described in the article.
In other words, if everyone in a mutual aid society is a crab who crossed half the world and an entire ocean to escape the bucket, eventually said crabs stop acting like you'd expect crabs in a bucket to act, and their social dynamics are consequently less suffocating.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overboard!_(1997_video_game)
reply