Tobold's Blog

Friday, September 11, 2026

Trump’s best idea

It is somewhat unfortunate that the Trump dividend of $5,000 for every adult American is never going to be paid. First of all it is linked to a condition even Trump knows is impossible, Republicans winning the mid-terms. And then it is just an empty promise, with Americans still waiting for the cheques Trump previously promised and never delivered.

But if the Democrats win the mid-terms, especially if the Democratic Socialists are doing well, the first thing they should do is to pass a bill for the Trump dividend of $5,000 to be paid out. Keep the label on, it makes it harder for Republicans and Trump to block the bill. Of course that will have to be balanced by raising taxes, for example with a “Zucman tax”, a 2% wealth tax on people owning more than $100 million. Okay, that would only bring in $100 billion of the $1.2 trillion cost of the Trump dividend, but other taxes on higher incomes and wealth could be added.

As the Trump dividend is $5,000 “per adult”, and the poorest people in America never pay that much in taxes for the simple reason of not being able to, the Trump dividend balanced by taxes would basically be a huge redistribution of money from rich people to poor people. That should not only appeal to the “social justice” desires of the Democratic Socialists. It is also very good for the economy. Trillionaire Elon Musk would barely miss the 2%, $20 billion. And he is unlikely to ever spend that sort of money on goods and services. But the 4 million Americans for whose $5,000 this would pay for would most likely spend the money, which would give a huge boost to the economy.

We have been promised trickle down economics for decades and they never showed up. Tax the rich, hand out the Trump dividend, and the wealth would finally start to trickle down! This has been Trump’s best idea by far, and the Democrats should do all in their power to make it a reality! Incidentally Democrats promising the Trump dividend if they win would also neatly neutralize the voter bribe aspect of the promise.

- posted by Tobold @ 8:59 AM Permanent Link (3) comments

Wednesday, September 09, 2026

Kiting in ZCOM

I have been playing games, on cardboard and on various computer platforms, for many decades. When I play a new game, and have to come up with tactics, I can fall back on my experience and use tactics that worked in older games, even if those games were not in the same genre. Now one of the first MMORPGs I played was Everquest. And because I liked being able to play solo sometimes, which the game wasn’t really designed for, I ended up playing a particular character with a particular tactic: The quad-kiting druid. Basically that was a tactic in which you aggroed up to 4 enemies, and by being faster than them managed to constantly run away from them. As long as you at least slowly damaged them, and they never damaged you, you would eventually win.

Kiting is not a universally useful tactic. Lots of games have built-in game mechanics that stop kiting from working: Enemies that don’t chase you forever, but run back to their point of origin and regenerate, or, in games with several characters, enemies that change their target if their first target is out of range. Kiting is also often thought of as a tool for real-time games, and plays less of a role in turn-based games.

Having said that, kiting does work in Star Wars Zero Company. Well, taunts only last for one round, so you need to refresh the taunt every round. But enemies do comply strictly with a taunt effect, and will run past another of your characters without attacking, even if they can’t reach the character that taunted them. So I was a bit surprised when watching various tactical and build tips for Star Wars Zero Company (maybe I should call it ZCOM for short), that kiting is not a commonly used tactic in this game.

ZCOM is about 40 cycles (days, battles) long, and around cycle 18 you unlock the ability to add a second specialization to all of your characters. By that time, Cly the Mandalorian already joined your team. So if you add the soldier specialization with the taunt ability to her, you get the perfect kiting character. She can taunt a bunch of characters with the bulwark ability and pistol shots, and then fly out of range with her jet pack. While the enemies fruitlessly pursue her, the other three squad members can shoot the enemies without even needing cover.

- posted by Tobold @ 9:53 AM Permanent Link (0) comments

Tuesday, September 08, 2026

A German commenting on German politics

Germany is a federal republic, consisting of 16 “lands”. You can think of them a bit like the US states, but relatively speaking they have fewer powers and less independence than the US states have. In one of these lands, Sachsen-Anhalt, there was an election this Sunday, and the right wing party AfD got 44% of the votes. Thus you might have seen global headlines about how the Nazis are back in power in Germany. Which is utter nonsense. I have repeatedly said on this blog that if you call everybody slightly to the right of yourself a nazi or fascist, you end up losing all linguistic tools to differentiate between parties on the right.

The AfD occupies a curious position on that right wing spectrum. On the one side they are extreme enough that the German intelligence service in charge of keeping an eye on extremists classifies them as “validated right extremists”, a classification that means that the intelligence service will continue watching them. On the other side they aren’t extreme enough to be declared illegal as a party, as several previous right wing parties in Germany have been. And while of course there are national peculiarities and things aren’t easy to classify, the AfD resembles US MAGA Republicans under Trump a lot more than they resemble German National-Socialists under Hitler.

A few other truths to know to understand the situation is that the AfD did not get an absolute majority in the election, and could only form a local government with the help of others. And even if they managed that, a tenous hold on a single land gives them very little actual power over Germany. If you think that Germany is fascist, you’d still have to admit that it is comparatively less fascist than the USA, which should put things into perspective.

Of course, if you are politically left of center, or center-left as I am, any MAGA-like party taking control anywhere is bad news. But there are 7 European countries were such far right parties are part of the national goverment, and far right parties play a large political role in basically all European countries to some degree. Germany is further away from the far right in national power than for example France is. History and false leaps of imagination might provide sensationalist headlines, but in the end that is just click bait.

The more realistic trajectory has already been observed in the past few years in countries like Hungary or Poland. The growth of right wing populist parties is a consequence of growing inequality, with the “left behind” demographics voting for the populists after feeling left behind by all the other parties. That model then breaks down as soon as the right wing populists come to power, and their voters realize that things aren’t getting any better for them. Viktor Orban lost power this year. In the US the current discussion is not whether the Republicans can win the mid term elections, but only how badly they are going to lose.

If you think that German Nazis will soon invade Russia, you might be in for a strange surprise: The AfD is Russia-friendly to the point of being suspected to be in Putin’s pocket. It is the democratic center-right and center-left parties that changed the German constitution to enable more military spending and increased armament against Russia.

- posted by Tobold @ 10:22 AM Permanent Link (8) comments

Friday, September 04, 2026

Classic games and cheap tricks

I am still having a lot of fun on my first playthrough of Star Wars Zero Company. Having said that, being over half through the game, I realized why this isn't going to become a classic game for me like XCOM 2 is. Star Wars Zero Company is using some cheap tricks to evoke a positive reaction from players, but those aren't sustainable, and ultimately hurt replayability. And no, I'm not talking about the cheap trick of calling the archvillain "Fathom", for the sole purpose to be able to name one of your chapters "The Fathom Menace" ...

In XCOM 2, battle maps are semi-procedurally generated. That results in much of your game experience being emergent, like rushing through a door and finding more aliens there than you had thought. In Star Wars Zero Company, battle maps are handcrafted, fixed, and scripted. In one mission you are allowed to control Anakin Skywalker, who is massively more powerful than your regular mercenaries. Cool! But only once. On your second run you'll know that will be coming, and rofl-stomping through the same level with the same overpowered character that isn't yours is already a lot less fun. Another mission has the battlefield exploding behind you, forcing you to move forward. Interesting! But only once. And the list goes on and on.

Basically, in XCOM 2 your "oh shit" moments happen as a result of the combination of the random setup and your decisions. In Star Wars Zero Company those "oh shit" moments are scripted jump scares. They only work once. Even the regular tactical gameplay gets a lot easier if you remember the map: On some maps the danger lies in the large number of small battle droids, and so the next time you'll take blaster pistols that fire a lot of shots. Elsewhere the challenge is big enemies with armor, so a repeater is the better choice of weapon. Some maps have a lot of bridges to shove enemies off, so you better take concussion grenades that do exactly that. I could play this game on the highest difficulty level if I would bother to start every battle, look around, then reload the situation back at the base and choose my team members and equipment in function of the battle ahead. A grenade that only hurts droids, not organic lifeforms, is only useful if you know ahead of time what your enemies are.

Of course XCOM 2 shares the problem with Star Wars Zero Company regarding the main events of the story. The same cutscenes and dialogues are less interesting the second time around, and the same turn of events aren't so interesting if you already prepared for them. Still I think that XCOM 2 has a much better replayability than Star Wars Zero Company, which I don't feel playing more than once.

- posted by Tobold @ 10:33 AM Permanent Link (1) comments

Thursday, September 03, 2026

A small comment about the bond market

James Carville, a political adviser to President Bill Clinton, famously said: "I used to think that if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president or the pope or as a .400 baseball hitter. But now I would like to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody".

If you follow financial news, you probably saw a lot of headlines about the bond market these last weeks. If you follow financial YouTube channels, you probably noticed some videos explaining what the heck the bond market actually is, and why it matters. But I think that most of these sources go into too much detail, and then forget to tell you the most important and most fundamental fact about the bond market:

The bond market is extremely hard to manipulate, and is therefore likely to give a pretty accurate economic signal. If, as right now, the signal from the bond market is that interest rates on government bonds are rising to historic heights around the world, the worrying thing is that it is A) a very bad signal for the future of the world economy and global governments, and B) highly likely to be correct. If you don't own bonds, and don't have a lot of debt, you might be able to ignore the bond market itself. But you need to consider the possibility that the bond market is sending a rather accurate signal that bad times are coming.

- posted by Tobold @ 12:46 PM Permanent Link (0) comments

I'm cheating in Star Wars Zero Company

I frequently cheat in video games. I am pretty much exclusively playing single-player games, so whatever I do, and whether I call it a cheat or a mod, affects nobody but me. I've been playing video games since the 80s, and I know myself and games well enough to know what I like and don't like. And thus I mod / cheat in order to make games more fun for me.

I rarely use extreme cheats like god mode. Games with zero challenge are often not much fun. I only consider god mode cheats if either the game is far too hard for me, e.g. Elden Ring. In some games, e.g. Valheim, I played most of the game normally, and then used god mode cheats for the boss fights, which are a considerable difficulty spike, and are about combat, while the reason I am playing the game is the resource management and building part. I'm not interested in the combat part, I don't enjoy the challenge of action combat, and so I use cheats to just skip that unenjoyable for me part of the game.

Most of the time, I only use cheats to tinker with minor parts of the game. The latest example is Star Wars Zero Company. That is generally a great game. But the base management and black market part of the game is a lot less fun than it could be, because you simply don't earn enough credits, and can't really do much about it. That is just my opinion, of course, but lots of other players think the same. Fortunately it is just a minor problem, that a cheat can easily solve. I'm using Wand/WeMod to simply add a nice stack of money like 10k or 20k credits at the start of the campaign. That way I can actually use the black market to buy stuff, without having to forego base upgrades whenever I want to buy a weapon mod or utility.

Obviously you can't cheat without affecting the difficulty. I'm playing Star Wars Zero Company on hard, and as I now can afford both base upgrades and some black market purchases at the same time makes that easier for me than for somebody who plays the game on hard without cheats. But I never see these single-player games as a competition, even if there are Steam achievements or something. If Star Wars Zero Company had a better economic system, where I could actually manage my credits better, I would do that. But as credits mostly arrive as mission rewards you have very little control over, the credit constraint isn't much fun to me, and so I decided to alleviate it.

- posted by Tobold @ 10:58 AM Permanent Link (2) comments

Sunday, August 30, 2026

Star Wars Zero Company First Impressions

I am playing Star Wars Zero Company for a day now, and up to now I am loving it. The tactical combat is excellent, with lots of variety, and the narrative is very well done, giving a solid Star-Warsy feel. But most of all, Star Wars Zero Company solves my problem with other games I played this year, dealing with companions. I don't think I have ever seen a game that lets me respec so freely and easily.

Take for example your starting companion Kabb Uppercut, who starts the game out as a scoundrel. While that isn't a bad class, there isn't much synergy between Kabb's special uppercut ability and the rogue abilities. I could have turned Kabb into a soldier, getting the soldiers melee damage bonus for the uppercut. But instead I decided to turn him into an assault, as the uppercut's refund of AP works really well with the assault's repositioning game. I can turn Kabb into any of the 8 classes, and give him any of the 4 basic weapons, for a huge range of possibilities. And if I wanted, I could have him be a different class in every mission without the slightest disadvantage other than it being confusing to me. I can even get any focus points I specialized him with refunded anytime, and put them somewhere else. So if you and me both do some story mission with Hawk, Kabb, Trick, and Jae, we might be using completely different character classes and loadouts and have a very different experience.

On the negative side, if we both do the same story mission, it will be on exactly the same map. And any triggered events like reinforcements will happen with the same triggers, which can be time or some player action, like reaching an objective. And side missions can actually reuse maps you've already seen in a story mission. The semi-procedural map generation system of XCOM 2 does produce better map variety.

So we can summarize Star Wars Zero Company with having challenges that are relatively fixed, and solutions that are very flexible. With dialogue only happening at the base, there isn't really any practical difference between a companion and a freely created mercenary. It will be interesting to see how much replayability this system produces.

- posted by Tobold @ 9:36 AM Permanent Link (1) comments

Saturday, August 29, 2026

Aurelio

Being a big fan of the XCOM series of games, I couldn't resist buying the just released Star Wars: Zero Company. It is described as an XCOM game in the Star Wars universe, but that at best describes the gameplay loop and setting; the narrative feel differs a lot from XCOM games, and is closer aligned to typical Star Wars vibes.

As usual, I started the game by playing the tutorial. Even if I am not new to tactical games, and am in fact playing on hard, tutorials are mostly useful to learn about the user interface. Nothing interesting ever happens in a tutorial ... I thought. And then Aurelio, one of my 4 starting characters, died in the tutorial. The tutorial is on rails, you can't actually prevent Aurelio from dying. Even if you turn the tutorial off and set permadeath to off, Aurelio still dies a permadeath. It is start of the "things aren't looking too good" starting situation exposition.

In a way Aurelio's death reminded me of those mobile game ads, where you see somebody playing the game in question deliberately badly, in order to make the viewer think "I can do better than that!" and download the game. Aurelio dies a stupid death, after having been previously wounded as consequence of an equally stupid move. It does somewhat teach the player how not to move your characters forward. Although that is to some degree counterproductive, as moving forward to flank is a very essential part of the tactics of the game.

I saved the game after the tutorial and am now busy downloading the latest Nvidia graphics driver, released a day before Star Wars: Zero Company. Apparently that one fixes problems with stuttering cinematics. Apart from that stuttering, I didn't have any technical problems yet. I liked what I saw in the tutorial, but of course it will take a lot more time to see how solid the gameplay loop and long term motivation is.

- posted by Tobold @ 10:12 AM Permanent Link (1) comments

Friday, August 28, 2026

Grand Theft Certainty

I can't drive virtual cars. If you consider the totality of video games, and all the activities there are in these games, there are things I am good at, and things I am bad at. I am bad at driving a car in a video game. I am not bad at driving real cars, but the controls for virtual cars and their behavior in games are very different from reality, and I'm not good at making that jump. Because I am bad at driving in games, I rarely play video games in which driving is a major part. I did play Grand Theft Auto: Vice City on the PS2, but that is about it for the GTA series. I own GTA V, but only because in 2020 I got it for free from the Epic Games Store, and I haven't even found the time to play it since.

Given all that, you can understand that my excitement about the upcoming November release of Grand Theft Auto VI is limited. Netflix doing an exclusive preview of the game baffles me, as I can't remember them having done that for other games. But what puzzles me the most is the general feeling of absolute certainty: Everybody is sure that Grand Theft Auto 6 will launch in November without the slightest technical problem, it will be the greatest game ever, it will immediately sell millions of copies, it will suck all money out of the video game market for weeks, so nobody else can have a successful game launch in November, and shortly after GTA 6 will switch on a live service multiplayer online part of the game that will not have any server problems and somehow not cannibalize GTA 5 Online either.

Personally, I am not so certain that all this will be true. In this day and age, who would believe that a major game studio like Blizzard Activision, EA, Bioware, or Ubisoft could be able to launch a multi-million player, multi-platform game without a hitch? Why would we automatically dismiss this possibility for most game studios, but be absolutely certain that Rockstar will do it? Why are we so certain that GTA 6 will be considered the best part of the series, when we have lots of examples of game series where the latest incarnation is considered less good than previous parts? And why would all our criticism of live service games and all our experience with them failing not apply to GTA 6 Online?

I don't doubt at all that GTA 6 will make truckloads of money. But I am open to the possibility that things could go wrong during launch, or that ultimately GTA 6 will not be considered the best game ever of the series. If parent company Take-Two Interactive would know the recipe of the secret sauce that makes any sequel better than the previous games, why didn't they use that sauce on Civilization VII or Borderlands 4? My general impression of the state of the video game industry is that there is no way to guarantee a surefire success, even for a $1 billion game.

- posted by Tobold @ 12:38 PM Permanent Link (2) comments

Thursday, August 27, 2026

Idiocracy

The internet promotes simplified extreme views over more nuanced and complicated considerations. Thus you probably have seen somewhere on the internet over the past few years headlines in which the 2006 movie Idiocracy is claimed to have come already true. Or heard about the "reverse Flynn effect", in which Gen Z is the first generation measurably dumber than previous generations, with Generation Alpha doing even worse. Then everybody attaches their own favorite scapegoat to those headlines, and confidently proclaims that it is "social media", or "AI", or "screen time" or whatever that makes young people dumb.

The reality is a lot more complicated. That starts with the question of how you measure how clever and/or well educated a generation is. As it turns out, there is an observer effect, related to the Heisenberg principle, and you can't measure intelligence and education without at the same time affecting it. Thus standardized testing led to schools "teaching to the test", which affected what pupils did and didn't learn to do. But an ever greater problem, unsurprisingly, as it is very often the culprit, is statistics.

Statistics say that by various measures of intelligence and education, the world roughly got smarter in the 20th century, the Flynn effect, and dumber in the 21st century, the reverse Flynn effect. The fundamental problem of headline numbers in statistics is that an average frequently hides the truth. The average wealth between Elon Musk and me is half a trillion dollars, but that simply doesn't tell you anything about my financial situation. Only if you drill a lot deeper and look at more detailed statistical data like percentiles a better picture emerges.

The truer picture about intelligence and education of young people is that even in the latest generations, the top 10% of pupils are better educated and more intelligent than the top 10% of previous generations were, and the Flynn effect continues. But the bottom 10% of pupils today are much, much less educated and are often lacking very basic problem solving skills. The gap between the best and and the worst has gone up very much, and the bottom has sunk so precipitously that the average has been going down.

Now again you can attempt to attach your favorite scapegoat reason for everything to those data. Personally, as I have always been worried about the rise in economic inequality, I can't help but think that a rise in economic inequality also results in a rise in educational inequality. Or to say it differently, the way that things are taught at school are not sufficient for a pupil without additional adult supervision at home to end up with a good education. With the likelihood of a pupil getting adult supervision when doing his homework being very much linked to socio-economic factors. Richer kids have tutors and prep schools, poorer kids are left to their own devices.

Homework in itself is a flawed system. Imagine a page with 20 math problems, all about addition of two numbers between 10 and 99. With some guidance, a kid of the appropriate age could learn a lot about fundamentals of addition from doing those 20 math problems. But chances are that nobody has explained to the kid that the purpose of doing those 20 additions is for him to learn something about additions. He just got handed the piece of paper and been told that he has to return it with the correct results on it. As long as the kid has any access to any electronic device, he'll realize that the fastest way to fill out the results correctly is by the use of anything from a calculator to Google search, without going through the hard and seemingly unnecessary step of learning about addition yourself.

Of course the advances in technology are partially to blame. Calculators existed already when I was young (and led to intense discussion in education). But ChatGPT can also write that essay about "what I did this summer" or do that book summary for a pupil, bypassing the need to develop writing and reading skills. Thus the scary headlines about pupils getting a high school degree without being able to read competently. At the same time another lucky kid is helped to develop skills in reading and writing, PLUS being taught about when to use ChatGPT, and how to competently judge and use the result. Guess which kid will do better in life afterwards.

In summary, if you were to go into hibernation and wake up in the future, chances are that society isn't ruled by idiots then. There will be highly intelligent and educated people around, and they will have most of the power in society. The question is how dumb the least educated people in society are, and that could possibly be some sort of dystopian future. Or humanity learns how to create better education systems, in which pupils aren't left alone with homework and have to decide for themselves whether to use quick fix technology to return it.

- posted by Tobold @ 11:47 AM Permanent Link (2) comments

Wednesday, August 26, 2026

Buffed

In Wrath of the Righteous, I am now level 15, and in the early phases of act 4. As I certainly mentioned several times over the years, I am not a big fan of D&D/Pathfinder systems above level 10. They generally don't scale very well, and tend to get a bit silly. This is even worse in Wrath of the Righteous, where in addition to regular levels you also get mythic ranks, which are even more powerful. Now your mythic path can work more or less well with your class. And every combination can break the game in a different way. If I had for example played a necromancer wizard with a lich mythic path, the story of how I am overpowered would be a different one. But here is my example, of a cleric (crusader) on the angel mythic path.

The idea of the crusader cleric is to have a cleric that is reasonably good at melee combat. Now besides healing, clerics have a lot of buff spells. Those either make you just plain stronger, or they protect you in some way against various negative status effects. In the Pathfinder: Kingmaker and Wrath of the Righteous games that normally results in a game loop where if you unexpectedly encounter an overly strong enemy that does something like poison your whole group and you lose the fight, you will reload and do much better on the second try. Because if you know what that enemy is doing, you can put that specific anti-poison buff on your group. But as there are quite a lot of different status effects you could protect against, and the buffs don't last forever, it is unlikely that you will have the correct protection spell on you when you meet an unknown enemy.

My angel cleric breaks that system. The mythic path allowed me to take the mythic abilities "enduring spells" and "greater enduring spells". That means that any buff with a duration of more than 5 minutes now lasts 24 hours. And the abundant casting mythic abilities increase the number of spells that I can cast every day. Plus the angel mythic path gives even more powerful buffs and increases my cleric caster level, allowing me to cast higher level spells. The overall result is that I can now put a whopping 20+ different buffs on my whole group for 24 hours, increasing their combat stats and protecting them from basically every status effect in the game. And my main character has some additional personal buffs that turn him into a fighting machine. Plus he doesn't have to cast buffs during combat anymore, so he has more turns in which he can hit enemies. And the other group members are also putting out more damage, because it doesn't happen anymore that they are disabled or weakened by some status effect, plus they have some positive buffs making them stronger.

Now act 4 of Wrath of the Righteous is pretty tough in some spots, and being overpowered sometimes actually feels necessary. But personally I don't enjoy that sort of high-level gameplay all that much. At lower levels I used to sneak into rooms to see what enemies were in there, and then cast the right buff for every situation. Now I just have every possible buff on the whole party all the time and just don't care what special status effect attacks the enemies have. So although I very much enjoy playing Wrath of the Righteous and played over 200 hours already, I am still pondering whether I want to finish act 4 and 5 to get to the end of the game, or whether combat at the highest level is just too silly.

- posted by Tobold @ 10:32 AM Permanent Link (0) comments

Sunday, August 23, 2026

Skipping content

In a game like Wrath of the Righteous, I have a tendency to want to play through all of the available content, including every side quest or companion quest. Experience points are a limited resource, and every side quest you do tends to give you some xp, making you stronger for the main quest line. The disadvantage is that some quests just aren't interesting, or don't really fit with your vision of your character.

Wrath of the Righteous is a very long game, Act 3 is an extremely long part of it, and me playing in turn-based mode isn't speeding things up either. Also the DLC add additional side quests to the game, so that playing through them all might not actually be necessary to have a good level for the main quest. So as I am approaching the end of Act 3, I decided to skip some content.

One series of quests I decided to skip consist of tile-laying puzzles. They aren't very well done, you can't see very well what you are doing, and due to lack of explanation there is a lot of trial and error. On Reddit, a lot of players dislike the puzzles. So I had the option of either stumbling around in the dark, or just following a guide, or skipping the content. As I don't find that gameplay interesting, I decided to skip the puzzles.

Then I skipped a companion quest out of roleplaying reasons: I am playing a good character, a crusader on the angel mythic path, constantly choosing the good options in dialogues. And one of the companions is secretly a serial killer. So at the point where that was officially revealed to me, I fought and killed the companion, instead of sparing her just to have further companion quest content. Maybe one day I'll do another run of Wrath of the Righteous, and play an evil character, like a Lich.

- posted by Tobold @ 12:22 PM Permanent Link (3) comments

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