I think you’d like how Exalted handles money. (Note: I’m talking about second edition here; I never got familiar with third edition.)

In Exalted, wealth is represented by a Background called Resources. Backgrounds are essentially stats that represent useful things your characters has in a general sense like wealth, fame, contacts, or a mentor. They go from zero to five.

Resources is a vague representation of wealth. At Reduces 1 you’re one meal away from total poverty. At Resources 5 you have something that passively generates substantial amounts of money for your character, whether that’s ownership of a lot of land or an army of accountants maintaining your investment portfolio. Whatever is is, it works without you having to deal with it.

In terms of game mechanics it’s easy to use: Prices are expressed as Resource scores. If you want to buy something you just compare your score to the item’s.

• If yours is higher, you just get the item as the price doesn’t affect your wealth significantly.
• If both scores are the same you get the item but have to reduce your Resources by one. This represents you having to liquidate a large amount of your assets to cover the price.
• If your Resources score is lower than that of the item, you can’t afford it.

It’s a nice system for a game that doesn’t want resource management to get in the way of epic adventure.

I got tired of it in 2013. While it does work in some places (Android does it reasonably well), I haven’t yet seen a good flat design on the desktop.

Windows 8 and 10 looked garish and hard to read, especially since everything is a rectangle with a one-pixel outline. Is it a button? Is it a text field? Maybe a thick progress bar? Who knows, they all look extremely similar.

While Apple did overdo it in the later big-cat OS X releases, I’ll take a felt-textured widget panel and a calendar bound in leather over an endless sea of hairline rectangles.

“Unintuitively, there is more than one employer in the world and I happened to work for a different one previously. I know; I’m as surprised and vaguely terrified as you are. Please let me help you put an end to this multicompany nightmare soon.”

“Certainly! What makes you think that there is more than one employer in the world and you happened to work for a different one previously. You know; you’re as surprised and vaguely terrified as I am. Please let you help me put an end to this multicompany nightmare soon?”

Never use Amazon for expensive electronics. There’s too much nonsense going on.

I tried to preorder a phone once. Sony offered a pair of earbuds as a preorder gift and I wanted that specific phone anyway so hey, why not. Unfortunately, their fulfillment partner happened to be Amazon.

Instead of my phone I received a book about Lemmy Kilmister. Oh, and they couldn’t correct the error; all they could do was to have me send the book back and get a refund and buy the phone again – which of course took me out of the preorder program.

Yeah, no. There’s too much bullshit with Amazon to trust them with expensive gear.

Apparently we got our floppies for cheap because we just had a whole bunch of pirated floppies.

Admittedly, some did have multiple games on them. That’s what LOAD"$",8 was for.

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Very true. Good coworkers can make work a lot more bearable.

Looking a bit into the company’s business can help, too. If they do something vaguely interesting that can be a bonus. I ignored that once in favor of perks and that got me into the complete disaster area that is fintech. Don’t make the same mistake.

I wouldn’t have gotten that far. That utter savage can’t even tell the difference between MT/s and MB/s.

Planes generally don’t go on rails so maybe that’s a factor.

Das Millionenspiel.

It’s The Running Man except twelve years earlier and a media satire instead of an action movie. It comments on TV phenomena that wouldn’t exist in Germany until two decades later (like scripted “reality” TV). Also, it has early appearances of one of Germany’s most famous TV hosts (as the show’s host, fittingly) and one of Germany’s most famous comedians of the 70s to 90s (in a completely serious role, unfittingly). And unlike the Schwarzenegger movie it doesn’t construct a dystopian future to introduce public bloodsports but merely gives a terse reference to a “law on active recreation” dated three years after the movie first aired.

To make it even more odd, it’s actually a good movie despite being from Germany and made for TV.

Given the usual quality of BIOS/UEFI option descriptions it’s remarkably close to being sensible. I would’ve expected something like “enables limiting CPUID maximum value”.

AI isn’t taking off because it took off in the 60s. Heck, they were even working on neural nets back then. Same as in the 90s when they actually got them to be useful in a production environment.

We got a deep learning craze in the 2010s and then bolted that onto neural nets to get the current wave of “transformers/diffusion models will solve all problems”. They’re really just today’s LISP machines; expected to take over everything but unlikely to actually succeed.

Notably, deep learning assumes that better results come from a bigger dataset but we already trained our existing models on the sum total of all of humanity’s writings. In fact, current training is hampered by the fact that a substantial amount of all new content is already AI-generated.

Despite how much the current approach is hyped by the tech companies, I can’t see it delivering further substantial improvements by just throwing more data (which doesn’t exist) or processing power at the problem.

We need a systemically different approach and while it seems like there’s all the money in the world to fund the necessary research, the same seemed true in the 50s, the 60s, the 80s, the 90s, the 10s… In the end, a new AI winter will come as people realize that the current approach won’t live up to their unrealistic expectations. Ten to fifteen years later some new approach will come out of underfunded basic research.

And it’s all just a little bit of history repeating.

Fair enough. The dumb ones were just loud enough to sound like 90%. But I sure did talk to some panicked dumbasses online back then.

I agree with the “nutcase” diagnosis but I think she just can’t tell paragliders and parachutes apart and thought these were paratroopers. Which Hamas somehow has now.

I remember the early 2000s when basically 90% of all Americans were absolutely certain that jihadists were going to attack their local supermarket any minute now because Power Cable, Nebraska was such a strategic target.

Heck, there was a bomb scare because of an advertisement campaign for Aqua Teen Hunger Force that involved placing PCBs with LEDs on them that would display characters from the show. Because surely Al Quaeda would put conspicuous LED displays on their bombs.

News media want people to panic so they keep tuning in. Panicked people tend to come up with remarkably stupid scenarios like “Al Quaeda have unlimited resources and can show up anywhere to shoot people at random” or “Hamas want to take Dorcester as a strategic location to strike at Israel from”.

And that’s okay. I can understand not wanting to see your son get put in harm’s way.

Of course it would be in really bad taste for your son to subsequently ask for a military parade in his honor. Just like it is when Trump does it.

Doesn’t that require extensions, which are only semi-supported?

Well, you can switch to non-GTK applications but beyond that you can’t really get more information density into apps that follow the Adwaita design language. You can’t even really theme them.

They’re within the European Broadcasting Area like all countries adjacent to the Mediterranean Sea (plus some adjacent ones). Bring in the EBA is more important here than being in Europe is. There’s no reason why Egypt or Iraq can’t participate.

Okay, there is one – most Arab countries refuse to participate while Israel does. But if Israel didn’t participate they’d be perfectly fine with showing up.

Oh, and there’s one big exemption: Australia can participate because they’ve been such big ESC fans for so long that we invited them for the 60th one as a one-off and then decided to keep them in because they’re cool. It’s pretty wholesome, which is very much in tune with the spirit of the ESC.

Well, yeah, if the car makers can add exceptions to the law and turn it upside down then the law becomes useless.

I explicitly wouldn’t allow that exception. If larger cars are less efficient then disincentivizing their use by means of higher taxes is clearly beneficial to society. If you want to drive that three-ton gas guzzler then you can surely afford that 30% higher vehicle tax. If you can’t, might I interest you in this comparatively efficient and tax-reduced Subaru Sambar?

Mind you, I would apply different rules to things like semi trucks that (at least in my part of the world) you can’t drive without a special license. But if you can drive it with a regular European class B license then the tax should scale progressively with size and mass because making larger and less efficient cars unattractive is specifically the point.