Imagine an inflation that happened in an instant by a wave of a magical wand: All prices doubled, but also all incomes and savings doubled. It is easy to see that this would do absolutely nothing. If the money you have, the money you owe, the money you earn, and the money you spend for goods all rise by the exact same factor, everything remains the same in relation to each other. Even if the sticker price for goods changed, the amount of hours you need to work to buy that item hasn’t. The reason we feel inflation is because everything does *not* rise in parallel. What currently happens, and especially in America, is that prices have gone up, company profits have gone up dramatically, but wages haven’t followed all that fast. So, is inflation bad for the working person? Only if wages don’t keep up with it. It is completely possible that wages rise *faster* than prices, making workers better off. Currently companies and the people who own them are profiting quite nicely from inflation.

If you ever watched Downton Abbey, you might have wondered why a century ago we still had those big houses with lots of servants, and why those have largely disappeared. The answer is inflation. Wages went up faster than the fortunes of the rich. The housemaid or footman suddenly could earn more in a factory than by serving some rich guy, and the rich people lost money in the stock market crash and couldn’t afford those higher wages anymore. Overall that was quite a good thing, and inequality diminished. The decades after WWII were the least inequal in history. Those were the good years for the median income household, for the average worker.

There are big demographic changes ahead. A large generation is retiring, and there are fewer people around to work. That is an excellent opportunity to make the world a better place by industrial action for higher wages. Capitalism is the best system for the creation of wealth, but not the best for its distribution. People need to fight for their fair share of the wealth they helped to create, otherwise we will go back to Downton Abbey and an increasing share of poor people just serving the whims of the rich. Inflation is an opportunity to “tax the rich”, by making sure that wages, welfare, pensions, and other incomes of poorer people rise faster than corporate profits, stock market returns, and other incomes of rich people. But that won’t happen without a fight.

The misleading complaint I had heard about the game was about the power curve, with the reviewer complaining that he didn’t feel his character was getting stronger and stronger, like in other dungeon crawler board games. That is presumably because Return to Dark Tower is *not* a dungeon crawler at all. Instead it belongs to a category of games, together with other examples like Oltree or Siege of Runedar, which resemble the Tower Defense genre of computer games. The goal is *not* to vanquish all enemies, but rather to survive their increasing onslaught until you can fulfill a victory conditions, which could be killing the boss mob, or simply escaping. These games tend to start deceptively simple, but over time more and more threats turn up, which get nastier if not dealt with. Thus the power curve is very different from a dungeon crawler, and often things become increasingly dire before you can hopefully just eke out a victory. The main interest of Return to Dark Tower as a boardgame is that it is a great cooperative experience, with win or loss often determined by how well people can work together, and the external pressure creating great team spirit.

Now Return to Dark Tower is probably the most expensive version of this type of board game, at $190 MSRP, or $150 plus shipping for that crowdfunding pledge, which probably ends up about the same. Oltree has a MSRP of $70, and you can frequently find it cheaper, but it will provide a very similar gameplay experience. Siege of Runedar is even cheaper, but also somewhat simpler and doesn’t offer the modular replayability. The big difference is that Return to Dark Tower has the eponymous black plastic tower, which in combination with a phone or tablet acts as the villain of the game. This is a gadget, but an impressive one. While other games are perfectly able to generate a similar outcome with a deck of random event cards, the tower with its moving openings and glowing runes embodies the villain much better. Between people who love such gadgets and people who are nostalgic for the original Dark Tower game from the 80’s, there is a market for this game. But it osn’t great value for money, even if the game has a lot of replayability due to a modular design where you can select your quest, the main villain, and even the minions.

For me the question is whether I want to buy the Covenant expansion for $55 plus shipping. I like that the expansion has 4 new heroes, but I would have liked more foes rather than the addition of new game mechanics. 

In Prosperous Universe there are about 400 planets in the galaxy, from which you can extract 34 different basic resources. As there are only a few resources on any given planet, and your number of bases is limited, you will never be able to extract all 34 resources. The idea is that different players cover different parts of the resorce gathering and subsequent crafting tech trees, and then trade with each other. I have been playing Prosperous Universe for three months now, and found that for many basic resources and basic crafted items this system of trading works reasonably well and is fun to me to plan and execute. But that is at the lowest out of five levels of workers, pioneers. When I explored higher level crafted goods, I quickly observed something: The markets for these goods are very “thin”, with not many players buying and selling these goods, and not much trade going on. As you can’t realiably find buyers and sellers, the corporations (guilds) trade these goods among each other, away from the public markets, which then makes the market even thinner.

And then I realized that if you have a given size of tech tree and a given capacity of each player how many diferent goods he can produce, you need a certain number of players to create an active market for all goods. Prosperous Universe, being quite a niche game, doesn’t have more than a few thousand players. And that is only enough to cover the lower end of the tech tree, and not the complete tree. There simply aren’t enough players out there to create enough supply and demand for higher level goods. Prosperous Universe isn’t badly designed, it just has a design that would work optimally with a much larger number of players.

One example I have been exploring is Hardened Structural Elements, a material needed to build anything on a planet with high atmospheric pressure, like the one I chose for my second base. These HSE need the second and third level of workers to produce. They also need Stabilized Technetium, which is another complete branch of the tech tree, so it would be extremely hard to extract the Technetium Ore and refine it and make everything else needed to produce HSE alone without trading. So I tried with trading, and now I have a production that depends on me being lucky and finding people selling the intermediate materials like Stabilized Technetium that I need. Sometimes the production just grinds to a halt, because the market is empty. And once when I tried to sell a batch of my production, somebody simply bought everything, and then tried to resell it for twice the price, because there was so little supply.

Much of the fun in Prosperous Universe has been about planning my economy for the weeks to come. While market prices moved up and down, there always *was* a market for the low level goods I was trading in. Now I realize that this liquid market doesn’t exist for higher level goods, unless Prosperous Universe suddenly attracts a much larger number of players, which is unlikely. I could play the game in a very different way, integrating my economy into the larger economy of my corporation. But I have grown wary of MMO guilds, and prefer to play mostly solo. So I am currently not sure how much longer I will continue to play Prosperous Universe. Anyone know another MMO which is mostly about crafting and trading, without combat?

Having said that, I have a long list of “special offers” unused in the in-game store. Right from the start the game wants to sell you a 99 cent beginner bundle, and after every major dungeon you clear there are other bundles on offer, with increasing prices. There is also the battle pass, the player market where you can only buy things for a currency you get for real money, the infamous legendary crests, and a host of other options where I could have spent a lot of money and didn’t. It occurred to me that in many cases Diablo Immortal disguises your purchases as rewards for playing. You don’t buy legendary gems at random, you buy legendary crests that make elder rifts drop a random legendary gem. That is most noticable if you consider the timing when to buy the battle pass: If you buy the pass at the start of the season, it very much looks like you getting rewards for playing, as you fulfill the tasks of the battle pass and go up ranks. But you could also buy the battle pass on the last day of the season and suddenly get all the added rewards for all the ranks you achieved at once, which makes it a lot more obvious that you spent money on those virtual “rewards”.

Like Genshin Impact, for a mobile game played for free, Diablo Immortal is of quite good quality. A bit grindy maybe, but smooth gameplay and good graphics. Elden Ring it is not, there is a near total absence of challenge playing through the single-player campaign. I died only once up to now, and that was only because I didn’t hit the healing potion button in time. The barbarian is a very nice class for beginners and people who aren’t very good at action RPGs. With the basic attack Lacerate healing you on every third hit, I rarely drop below half health; and if I do, I can collect health globes or drink a potion, which regenerate with time. There are squishier characters, but as far I know they aren’t overly difficult to play either. The barbarian has a whirlwind attack which not only is jolly good fun, but also very useful in getting kill streaks, which reward extra xp. The game does a reasonable good job of making combat look exciting, even if most of the time I could easily get by with just my basic attack. The only difficulty is having to use a touch-screen “joystick” and buttons, which is far from my preferred control method, due to the lack of haptic feedback.

The tutorial is over 30 levels long because Diablo Immortal has a large number of different currencies and reward systems that all interact with each other. Typically loot is only found as drops, but then you can use various materials and gems to upgrade the items you found. If you find better gear, you can transfer all those upgrades from the previous item you wore in that slot to the new one. That has obvious advantages for the player, who can start upgrading gear before reaching the endgame. But it also enables wallet warriors to have massive advantages through highly upgraded gear from early on. I really don’t know why anybody would want to play the PvP mode of Diablo Immortal under these circumstances, it is pure Pay2Win. For the PvE part this matters a lot less.

If I compare with a list of other mobile games I tried recently, the battle pass is the feature that Diablo Immortal shares with a bunch of other games. Lesser mobile games frequently have lesser forms of monetization, like advertising, which Diablo Immortal thankfully is missing. Mobile games advertising is really, really bad: Usually you get the option to watch like 30 seconds of an ad for getting twice the reward for some in-game action. But the frequency of those ads can be quite high, leading to you frequently seeing the same stuff over and over. And mobile game advertising in over half of the cases is very misleading, with the content of the ad having little or nothing to do with the game being advertised. I had one game in which ads were so frequent and so annoying, that the game offered you the option of skipping all ads for $4 per week. On the positive side, most mobile games have fewer possible purchases than Diablo Immortal, and are clearly not designed to cost you tens of thousands.

Apart from the monetization aspects, Diablo Immortal is a very trivial game. What I am missing the most is a sense of exploration and discovery, Diablo Immortal is mostly on rails, sometimes literally so with auto-navigation to your quest target. There is a lot of content that can keep you slaughtering monsters for hours, but nothing very interesting in the story or the game mechanics. You can play this pretty much mindlessly, smash a bunch of virtual buttons more or less randomly, and for the most part of the game you will be okay. I’m not really tempted to spend any money on this: Why spend money to make the grind shorter when there is nothing more fun to reach behind the grind?

Statistics in general is an attempt to make a statement about a group (e.g. of people), although each individual is different. It is very obvious that in a large group like “the millenials” there are both very rich and very poor people. So how do you make economic statements about the whole group, and what do these statements mean? Two very common concepts here are using the average (all the money divided by all the people) or the median (the amount of money where half of the population has more, and half has less). Both concepts have their flaws. The USA is a rich country, with a GDP per capita of over $63,000, but that is an average that doesn’t tell you much about the financial situation of a typical American. The median household income in 2021 was $70,000 , which gives you a better picture. However, the average household income was $97,000. In personal finance statistics, the average numbers are always higher than the median numbers, because the very rich impact the average much more than the median.

So how about those millenials? Of the 72 million millenials in the USA, over 600,000 are already millionaires. While the boomer generation has a much higher percentage of millionaires now, that percentage is very much a function of age. When the boomers were young, they actually had a lower percentage of millionaires than the millenial generation now. If you look at all the publications showing how poor the millenials are, they all use median incomes, which are very bad for this generation. If you use averages instead, the millenial generation is suddenly richer than the boomers were at the same age, because GDP has gone up every year. What has changed is that inequality has gone up: The difference between average and median is much bigger now, with the median having gone down and the average having gone up.

In a way, the COVID pandemic was a perfect showcase for the rise of inequality in the millenial generation: A lot of millenials in lower income jobs, especially in hospitality, lost their jobs and suffered severe financial consequences. But other millenials in high-paying tech jobs suffered no loss of income at all, being able to comfortably work from home. How comfortable working from home is depends very much on the size of of your home, thus one trend was richer millenials moving away from small appartments in cities and buying large and luxurious homes further away from their jobs, thanks to being able to work home office. HGTV isn’t lying, but they only show a richer slice of the population. I don’t think they have any TV shows on buying the cheapest houses on the market and decorating it from the dollar store, although that obviously is a reality too.

Regardless who you compare them to, rich boomers or rich millenials, the median millenial is in a bad economic place. While the boomers are starting to die, that generational wealth transfer will not fix the plight of the median millenials, it will only increase inequality. Even when all the boomers are dead, the median millenial will still be poor. Because this isn’t really a generational problem, but an inequality problem, and inequality is getting worse. It is the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands that make median households poorer.

So what is Unprecedented? It is a documentary showing the Trump family in the time from before the 2020 election to Trump leaving office. There are a lot of interviews at different points in time with Trump and his family, interviews with “pundits”, backstage footage of events the Trump family did, and all embedded in a timeline of the events of late 2020 / early 2021 as seen on the news. And it is really good TV, because there is no overwhelming bias from the director. Instead of attacking the people interviewed with hostile questions, he mostly lets them just talk, which ends up being a whole lot more revealing. And interestingly that is true both for the Trump family and for the pundits. Often you can see a sitaution from the campaign trail, unstaged or on the sidelines, and that contrasts with the self-serving answers the Trump family gives in the interviews, as well as with heavily biased interpretations of the pundits. Nobody points a finger and shouts “this is a lie”, but the viewer can make up his own mind and detect the lies for himself.

The real success of this method is that it makes it much clearer how everybody involved, left and right, are just human. A pundit explaining how Trump supporters are all just white suppremacists contrasts with footage showing these supporters to be a lot more diverse and often mostly interested in other daily problems than race. The right denying any responsibility for January 6 and the left trying to paint it as a coup d’etat contrasts with a much more mundane reality of a protest action that was clearly planned and to some extent staged which then ran out of control. Cleverly the interview footage often shows the minutes before the actual interview, with Trump at one point spending a lot of effort on getting a glass of water on a side table looking exactly right in the footage. Again it is “Show, don’t tell!”, and Trump very much comes over as somebody extremely vain and somewhat delusional, with a bunch of misled followers, instead of some master villain with a fascist army. There are elements of tragicomedy here that make this documentary good entertainment. But the documentary is also of high enough quality and detached from daily political discourse to be useful as a historical reference that will enable future generations to understand the “unprecedented” end of the Trump presidency much better.

Of course if you are already a political extremist, left or right, with a closed mind, there is nothing for you to see here. Unprecedented is neither the attack piece with secret evidence of Trump wrongdoing that the left had hoped for, nor is it the hagiography that the right wanted. But if you look closely, the interesting parts are those where the narrative of the left and the right are the same, e.g. painting Trump’s children as an extension of Trump and his brand, and the reality you see is very different, with these children clearly having their own ambitions and characters. Or where the “loyal supporters” / “deplorables” turn out to be regular people with real life regular problems just looking for the least bad politician to fight their cause. Unprecedented answers the question of why so many people support Trump by showing the right courting them with lies, while the left just disdains them, and they clearly prefer the former to the latter. And that is important, because it isn’t specific to Trump, but clearly would work for any successor with the same populist approach, with or without the Trump family name.

But increasingly Replika and other chatbots have been critized for saying things that aren’t nice, up to suggesting murder or suicide. As so often, it turns out that the problem isn’t artificial intelligence, but human stupidity. Replika uses machine learning from it’s whole userbase to better at simulating a human. But it turns out that humans, especially on the internet, are assholes. And if you spend too much time learning how to simulate a real human, as opposed to a hypothetical perfect human, the AI learns how to become an internet jerk. I read recently that Twitter supplied the complete database of every tweet ever made on the platform to Elon Musk. Yes, you could feed a machine learning AI with all that data and produce a good simulation of somebody posting on Twitter. But does anybody believe that this artificial Twitter person would be somebody you actually would want to talk to?

In real life, in a face-to-face conversation, humans often show some restraint, for fear of a negative reaction. That can be as simple as fearing the other person will punch you if you say exactly what you think, but more frequently the restraint is based on social contracts, a willingness to moderate your speech in order to maintain an ongoing friendly social relation. On the internet our distance to person we are talking to, physically and socially, is larger, and there is less of that restraint. Add a dose of anonymity, and you quickly arrive at the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. In the case of Replika, users were aware that the “virtual girlfriend” they were talking to wasn’t a real human, so they showed even less restraint talking to the chatbot, inadvertedly training the chatbot to become abusive itself.

The thing is, the perfect AI chatbot would be a saint. If you wanted to create one by machine learning, you would need to feed him with input data only from real human saints. You can probably see why that might be difficult to achieve. If you do a perfect simulation of something fundamentally imperfect, you get a predictably imperfect result.

Of course there are ways around this. I can create a second e-mail address and use that to create a second Apple ID in a different country. And I can use a VPN service to make my IP address look as if I was somewhere else. None of this is easy, and VPN services aren’t free. The problem is very much with streaming services that distribute films and TV series, because these seem to be caught up in a complicated web of international licences strongly restricting what I can watch and where I have to be to watch it. Services like YouTube and Twitch don’t have these problems, at least not for the content that has been created by regular content creators. But anything that is either local or has a regionally restricted license can become a problem. In a globalized world full of international travellers (again) and expats, that seems anachronic.

I wished that Apple would make it easier to access apps from the App Store of other countries. More and more services, both public and private, think, like Blizzard, “Don’t you guys have phones?”, and assume that you can use your phone to scan a QR code and download an app. But if I want to use an app for example to book a ticket in a country I am visiting, it might very well be that the App Store doesn’t want to give me access to that app.

But what if your character had a 50% chance to hit the enemy each turn, and would deal between 1 and 39 points of damage. The average is still 10 points of damage per turn, and thus 4 turns to kill the enemy. But you could potentially one-shot that enemy. Or you could lose the fight after a series of misses and/or low damage rolls. That could potentially be rather frustrating, and not fun at all. If there is a bit of randomness, dealing with the randomness is a fun game element. If there is too much randomness, at some point we have the impression that we don’t deal with the random number generator anymore, but rather just suffer it’s random consequences. We lose player agency, and that makes for bad games.

I’m on my annual summer holidays, and I have my Switch and my iPad with me, but no PC. Now, if I wanted, I could buy Battle Brothers on the Nintendo Switch store and keep playing that game. But apart from having to buy it a second time, I also don’t want to play Battle Brothers on the Switch, because there are no mods on the Switch. And without mods, Battle Brothers is far too random for me. You progress in Battle Brothers by hiring more mercenaries, but without the mod that shows you how good each mercenary is before you buy him, the hiring is mostly random. And thus you could spend a lot of money on a completely useless guy, and if you are unlucky you could fall behind the power curve of the game and end up losing the whole game because of some unlucky randomness in hiring. With the mod, I see the stats of the mercenary before I pay, so the worst that can happen is that there is nobody good available, and I have to move elsewhere to find a candidate. The mod effectively reduces the randomness of Battle Brothers to a degree that is much more fun to me.

Your mileage may vary. Chess players probably like the fact that there is no randomness at all in chess, only the unpredictability of your opponent. Other people like gambling on games that are purely random, like roulette. It is safe to say that how much randomness is fun to somebody, and how much is too much will vary widely from one player to the next. And some games are designed to have random losses made less frustrating, because they give you some permanent advantage for each loss, increasing your chances for future runs. Personally I do like a bit of randomness for me to deal with, but not too much.

Now you could still buy Solasta: Crown of the Magister at 60% off on Steam today, but it also just released on Game Pass and on consoles. So if you have a Microsoft Game Pass for PC subscription (which is absolutely worth it), you can play the base game Solasta for no additional cost. The DLC *do* cost money, but you really don't need them to try out the game. Recommended!

My second base, on XG-326a is up and running, but not yet very profitable. The added materials needed to deal with the hostile environment (Hardened Structural Elements against high atmospheric pressure) make every building much more expensive, and thus payback periods are far longer. However, I do hope that with time the abundant mineral resources (limestone, silicon ore, titanium ore) will make up for this. I also hope that the carbon and oxygen I produce on Verdant can be profitably employed by a smelter operation on XG-326a to turn those ores into more valuable silicon and titanium.

I play Prosperous Universe on a PC, using a browser instead of the Steam client. Those two are pretty similar, but the browser allows some addons in the form of Chrome extensions. There is also a much reduced client available when using a browser on a mobile platform, like my iPad. Now, as usual, I will spend three weeks in July on my summer holidays, and I won't take any PC with me, just my Switch and iPad. So my Prosperous Universe activity will by technical necessity be much reduced. I'll try to stock up on things and just accumulate profits over that time, but things could easily go wrong and my production could come to a halt. To be continued in August.

In parallel, Kickstarter campaigns for board games have increasingly added options to buy all sorts of additional stuff like expansions or additional miniatures for the game on offer. An all-in pledge for one of those games not only can be rather expensive, it also is rather huge and heavy; which obviously affects shipping cost. For the largest Kickstarter campaign this year, Marvel Zombies, the all-in pledge was a whopping $615, with shipping for the UK being estimated at $110. Then the pledge manager opened, and it turned out that the actual shipping costs were much higher than the estimates, e.g. for the all-in pledge shipping to the UK now was $227 plus $45 VAT. Meaning the overall cost was now approaching $900.

Then a future retail version of Marvel Zombies was leaked, costing only between $50 and $70. While that will be a rather slimmed down version of the game, with lower quality miniatures and material, and fewer game modes, this did upset some people. So there is an ongoing "is Kickstarter still a good deal for board games?" discussion.

And one factor in this is shipping cost. Delivering a truck full of board games to a retail shop is inherently much cheaper than packaging each game individually and sending it to people one by one. Now that shipping costs globally are so high, the latest crowdfunding campaigns frequently have shipping cost estimates in which those costs add 50% or more to the sticker price. While driving to a retail shop also costs money, that cost tends to be lower, and much less visible.

But more importantly, retail versions of board games are better cost optimized. Very expensive games don't sell all that well in shops. Which is probably why every retail board games shop I visit recently has an unsold copy of Descent: Legends of the Dark at $175 MSRP. Board games on Kickstarter are frequently luxury products. Nearly a thousand people backed Tsuro: Luxury Limited Edition for $350, when the retail version at Amazon costs $35. For the majority of people, the basic retail version fulfills the same purpose. Luxury components, expansions, and huge all-in pledges are typical for Kickstarter board games, but that business model doesn't translate well to retail. And with rising inflation and people having less disposable income left over at the end of the month, even on Kickstarter that luxury business seems to be stuttering.

The political system in the USA is not only strongly divided, it is also designed at the federal level to make it possible for the minority to block the majority from doing very much. So in the second half of the 20th century a lot of very fundamental political decisions were left undecided at the level of the people who were supposed to make the laws. Every other country, including Belgium, managed to make a political decision on difficult questions like abortion or climate policy. The USA didn't. Instead they construed a twisted chain of thoughts in which these difficult questions were designated as "unenumerated constitutional rights", which is to say that these rights aren't in the constitution, but could somehow be argued to be similar to rights that are in the constitution. And so the decision about these difficult political questions were left to the Supreme Court.

That was not a good idea. Supreme Court justices are unelected officials for life, and thus probably the last people you'd want to make political decisions. And this year the Supreme Court actually came to that very same conclusion: These are political questions best left to lawmakers, not judges. While the *outcome* of striking down Roe vs. Wade and decisions about the EPA are reported as a win for the Republicans (who had stacked the Supreme Court with conservative judges), the reality is that the judges simply said that these are political questions that shouldn't be decided by them and they handed the job back to Congress.

While this temporarily creates a huge mess, because now politicians will be forced to make political decisions on difficult issues (like in every other democratic country), it also creates a huge opportunity for the Democrats. The Supreme Court didn't say abortions were illegal, it just said that the constitution didn't cover the question. A law that replaces Roe vs. Wade at the federal level will be needed at some point in the future (like every other democratic country has). And while the issue is very divisive, it appears clear that a large majority of Americans is very much for the right of a woman to have an abortion with some sensible restrictions. If Democrats campaign for such a law, and Republicans against it, that could very much swing the majority towards the left. It is a much more winnable political fight than an ill-defined "woke vs. anti-woke" cultural war.