Certain industries such as film adjacent industries definitely remind me of what you are describing. Small scale, small shop, profound expertise, able to immediately work and iterate. And the way they solve healthcare is simple. They don’t offer health insurance benefits at all. Employees buy it for themselves from Covered California.
Yeah I have a friend who does this as a livng, and it sounds insane. They do stuff like where a director approves a piece of concept art for a prop, before he gets on the plane for a 12 hour flight for the shoot.
In the available time, they have to model, 3D print, paint and wire up every piece art, so by the time the director gets there, its ready for the shoot. There's no room for mistakes, as each of these processes takes long enough that a repeat is not feasible.
Yet everything he does works, and he does it every time. Even if I pulled off that stuff once in the amount of time given, it would be something I kept bragging about for the rest of my life.
I never saw actual downward price pressure on unsold new physical games. At most they’d go for $45 instead of $60. Only at gamestop with the most ratty booger infested chewed by dog used copy would you see real deals. That or boomer parents selling off their kids childhood when they went off to college for pennies on the dollar, but I think going forward gen x parents are smart enough to check prevailing values on electronics, so that source of deals are gone too.
Discs are way more convenient. You can store how many multi hundred gb games on your internal storage before you have to start triaging. Also, want to play a game you haven’t played in a while after work? Sorry, 3 hour forced update.
In the old disc era you’d just pop in the disk and start playing in minutes. You could have as many disks as would fit in your house.
Oh no, you have to stand up and walk 10ft to put it in. What a great inconvenience.
Reading through Steam's list of what's allowed or not, it all seems very reasonable:
* Up to 6 people can share games in a family account
* Each account can join as an adult or a child
* No age verification done, the person who created the account simply marks each invitation as "join as an adult" or "join as a child"
* Adult members have parental controls over child members and can control which games they have access to
* Child members must get purchases approved by an adult member
* No requirement for any particular family structure, like limiting it to two adults. Six roommates sharing a large house can form a Steam family if they want.
The only thing that is even slightly restrictive is the one-year cooldown on joining a new Steam family group if you leave the old one, and even that is pretty reasonable. (Without that, people would abuse the system by saying "Hey, join my family group real quick and I'll share my copy of Portal 2 with you, then leave the group when you're done). Plus, if you're rejoining the family group you just left then there's no cooldown, so "Oops, I clicked the Leave button by mistake" doesn't penalize you.
I think that's the VPN rather than the IP. I've had a family set up with someone I don't live with for years and it's never been an issue. The initial account enrollment has to be in the physically same location but after that you can roam.
Some of the more out there UFO theories postulate on these lines. An idea that rather than say send an explorer of your own species to some planet with all the needed life support, you use genetic engineering to create a worker bee essentially, already tailored to perform whatever function under whatever environmental conditions are present at the target planet. You may even be able to build this species using genes already present at the host system in some reduced to essential components fashion like an engineered plasmid in the molecular biology lab. This would also double as camouflage keeping the worker bee genetics separate from genetics found in your own planet or star system, making them appear endogenous to the target planet instead.
Thank goodness you found a basic flaw in red light and speed enforcement cameras. It's shame it's taken decades for someone to realize this issue and now we can finally start working on solutions like taking two photos.
