[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overboard!_(1997_video_game)

[1]: https://uhk.io/

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

Edit: in the "Linked Games" tab.

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.

[1]: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamefamily/63557/series-undau...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The amount of energy in your brain it takes to do this basic thing versus the amount of energy in a datacenter somewhere, and the slide into cognitive atrophy that must result...

There are things I'll happily use LLMs to accomplish, but offloading day-to-day executive function will never, ever be on that list. And every day I understand and sympathize with the ethos of the Butlerian Jihad more and more.

Our politicians did then and do now frequently miss the trees for the forest when assessing foreign crises (and I'm inverting that saying deliberately). Ho Chi Min was a nationalist first and a communist second, but all our leaders could see was a monolithic, global communist bloc. In fairness to them, hindsight is 20/20 and the Sino-Soviet split wasn't obvious to outsiders until the late 60s or early 70s.

We still don't trade with Cuba, and that is a clear sign of ongoing foreign policy failure. But who knows, in a year's time we may be trading with Cuba again. We're trading with Venezuela now.

I'm getting at outcomes, whether or not a war is a good idea in the first place. War is never a good choice, IMO, but can sometimes be a necessary choice or an inevitability.

It's perfectly reasonable to point out that a war initiated for the wrong reasons had good (or some good) outcomes, or that a war initiated for the right reasons had bad (or some bad) outcomes. And that all war is ultimately terrible.

Our own Civil War was initiated for the right reasons and yet it became the bloodiest war in our history. More Americans died during our Civil War than during all our other wars put together, and Britain was able to end slavery across their whole empire without any war at all, though at great national expense (continuing payments until 2015 or so) and with some bloodshed on the seas.

Strange. I don't remember writing that trading relations afterward justify the initiation of a war. Instead, I only remember writing that it is a better metric to assess the outcomes.

It's stranger still that you read these things between the lines, when my comment specifically includes a recollection of my own disquiet with the Afghanistan War, probably the most justified war of the four enumerated, that I felt while the war was happening.

Korea: the south became an economic powerhouse with whom we now trade for critical computer components and is a generally reliable ally in the region.

Vietnam: we now trade with them happily and enjoy generally productive relations, largely because they fought us for less than two decades but fought China for centuries and centuries.

Iraq: we aren't yet a generation past, but the government they have now is better than what they had under Saddam Hussein, even if it was almost immediately subverted by Iran. And jury is out on Iran because that hot war just started.

Afghanistan: we aren't yet a generation past, but very likely the most clear failure in this list. I remember thinking in high school (during the active phase of the war): "if we actually want to make a difference, we'd have to stay a century or more, and we don't have the will to do that the way the British or Russians tried to, and even they ultimately failed to make any local changes."

Europeans also need to realize that everyday Americans don't actually care about Europe very much and never truly have. It took the Lusitania to get us into World War I, Pearl Harbor (and Hitler's declaration of war) to get us into World War II, and the credible threat of the Soviet Union to keep us in Europe for decades after the war. The husk of Russia at the center of the Soviet skeleton isn't a credible threat to America, and the American reversion to the mean of isolationism began as the Cold War ended. That reversion completed sometime between 2010 and 2015. There is a new credible threat, but that is China, and even to well informed Americans Europe is slipping from their attention.

Most people in Trump's government probably don't care that much about reopening Hormuz quickly. Gas prices are only truly spiking in U.S. states where local environmental regulations have obstructed access to domestic and regional supply, and the largest of those states (i.e. California, New York) have broken against Republicans in every Presidential election (9 of them in a row) since the end of the Cold War.