Years of re-enactment combat got me thinking along the same lines.
The core of hand-to-hand combat is feinting - persuading you are going to hit your opponent in one place, so they move their defences to that place, and then hitting them in another place. That's a simple mechanic that could be translated easily into cards or any other bluffing format.
It gets more interesting with animals (who don't feint much) and large monsters (who don't need to feint because their attacks will overwhelm your defences), so dodging and armour come into it then.
But that brings up hit points, which are a ridiculous mechanic for modelling all of this. Stabbing someone in the arm or in the gut is completely different, it has very different effects, and should be modelled differently.
And this is where the rabbit-hole takes over and it gets too complicated ;)
Conversely, the Go community tends to actively shun frameworks, especially anything Rails-like, and will tell you to just use the standard library. Which is good advice, the standard library really does have everything you need. But it's also roughly on a par with what's available in Rust (though as someone said above, the Go stdlib routines have been heavily, massively, tested in production by now, and are fully mature and load-bearing).
Interesting! Are Go backend building custom auth, admin, DB ORM/migrations/auto migrations, templates, email, dev server etc for each project? Or each person and org has their own toolkit they use?
There are various libraries people use for auth, etc. But rolling your own isn't hard - Go has (e.g.) bcrypt in the standard library, so most of the heavy lifting is already done, you can write a solid auth implementation in <50 lines of code using that.
Generally Go prefers libraries to frameworks. Wrap the hard bits up into a library that can then be used widely in any implementation, rather than rolling it into a one-size-fits-all implementation that doesn't really suit anyone properly.
We had this experience with a local town centre where the high street basically died. Retailers priced out by high rents, which was fine when the economy was good and people were spending, but as soon as it took a dip there was nowhere to go and they had to shut up shop.
And this mechanism was why; almost all the real estate was owned by funds and leveraged. Property values based on a multiplier of rent. They could weather a long spell of zero rental income because that effectively cost them nothing, but if the rent went down then the value went down and they had to come up with the difference.
That seems like a rather inefficient use of resources. How long will a fund typically keep that on the books before they have to offload the asset or declare bankruptcy? At a certain point, that smells like a scam with a real estate business attached to it.
Commercial real estate lending typically has a clause that allows pausing of payments during a vacancy and letting the interest accrue into the balance of the loan - effectively, the banks are giving the property owners a free option to try and get the vacancy cleared without affecting long-term incomes and asset prices.
America has a long history of privatizing profits and socializing costs.
Market economies are clearly preferable over demand economies (like, no question about it), but Late Stage Capitalism is bad for everybody except the oligarchs.
John Steinbeck once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
With AI and Robotics looming over us, we would be very well served to re-examine our economic systems while we still have a chance.
> That seems like a rather inefficient use of resources.
Inefficient for society? Yes. But for the capital providers aka investment (and let's be clear: retirement) funds and banks? Definitely not.
The fundamental problem at the root of all of it is how the US does pensions. In contrast to most European countries that operate in a redistribution system, aka the current workers pay the pensions of the current pensioners in exchange for "IOU tokens", the US has everyone responsible for themselves... which leads to a constant influx of cash into all kinds of asset markets, no matter the market conditions.
And that is bad, for multiple reasons.
- it ties general economic downturns to people's pensions. That in turn factually prevents politics from doing what is right (e.g. restrict climate gas emissions), because a lot of companies make a lot of money by abusing the environment and cracking down on that would lead to them losing value.
- it creates a lot of perverse incentives. When you got almost 50 trillion dollars in total retirement funds [1] with hundreds of billions of dollars in new savings each year... that money has to go somewhere where it is backed by a physical asset or a consumption in the end. A lot of that money ends up in government bonds, which "allows" the US to cut taxes for the ultra-rich without limitations and balloon the national debt without consequences because guess what, the US can "always" borrow money. It's just as bad as Japan, only less openly exposed. What does not end up in bonds ends up primarily on the real estate market, driving the nonsense we're discussing here, and what remains goes into crap like Yo [2].
- it disincentivizes the forces of the free market from holding bad actors accountable. Under "normal" conditions, the AI bubble or Tesla would simply have run out of cash years ago because no one would give them more money, but when the scam is so large it ends up in the S&P 500, cash will flow in automatically from all the dumb money that is going into ETFs and other pension investment vehicles. Once you are in, you stay in.
- To make it worse, people are increasingly going from "moderate" managed funds to the extremes: either purely tracking funds that have virtually no fees deducting profits (and, in exchange, do not exercise voting rights) or into high-yield "activist investor" funds that love to do exploitative shit like forcing companies to redistribute their liquidity reserves as dividends (robbing the company of resilience against economic downturns) or engage in LBOs, buy-and-break-apart schemes and the likes. These almost always offload the consequences of making money for investors onto society at large... like, for example, malls falling apart because anchor stores fell victim to the vultures. Toys'R'Us is one particularly nasty example.
> At a certain point, that smells like a scam with a real estate business attached to it.
The entire pension based economy in the US is the true scam - in the end, it's all IOUs just like our "pension points" in Europe. If there is no economy around due to demographic collapse or whatever, the IOUs become just as worthless.
Normally I wouldn't even care, but unfortunately, the US pension market is so large that a lot of dollars flow out elsewhere, including our healthcare system, and I'm sick and tired of American vultures buying up everything in Europe Just Because They Can.
This is broadly accurate, but it can be a little easier to point the finger at the actual culprits, which is Wall Street.
The problem is the financialization of everything, and the insistence on ensuring high rates of return above all other goals. Which is highly related to the dynamics that you mentioned here, so we're agreeing.
But other countries don't do this because the government stops them. In this country, the financial sector is more powerful and can override democracy through a couple of obvious means that we've all seen.
The result is effectively the plundering of a previously strong economy for the benefit of a couple of people.
Ask yourself why General Motors is taking the many billions of dollars in cash that they generate from their business operations and literally sending it directly to Wall Street bankers through the form of stock buybacks rather than investing in the next generation of electric cars. It's an obvious mistake, and eventually the bill will come, but maybe not in the lifetimes of the people who profit from it. Certainly not before they have a chance to buy another summer home.
China doesn't do this. They keep savings rates high and returns low, which means the money goes into building factories and infrastructure and lots of other things that ultimately make the country much, much wealthier.
> Ask yourself why General Motors is taking the many billions of dollars in cash that they generate from their business operations and literally sending it directly to Wall Street bankers through the form of stock buybacks rather than investing in the next generation of electric cars.
Hmm, putting aside others issues (e.g. stock-manipulation to make quarterly numbers) stock-buybacks might be viewed similar to repaying a loan and reclaiming the stock that was put up as collateral...
Although I suppose if the loan is zero-interest, why would one want to do that? Even if somehow all spending options are terrible today (but might improve tomorrow) one could just sit on the cash.
All spending options are not terrible today. That's the point. Without reinvestment, the companies will fall behind and die.
The decisions by major companies to prioritize stock buybacks over capital investment in the next generation of products and innovation is the absolute core of why the financialization of everything threatens to destroy us as an industrial economy and, by extension, our prosperity and way of life.
Americans save at a much lower rate than Europeans (5% US vs. 15% EU), which I think makes your whole thesis backwards. Maybe Americans SHOULD be saving more for retirement, but they aren't!
The flip side is redistributive pensions require an ever growing population and most European pension systems will go bankrupt within a couple of decades given current birth and immigration rates.
> The flip side is redistributive pensions require an ever growing population
Stonk market based pensions require that as well! Someone has to work in the future and earn dollars so that he can give me these dollars for my stonks. And that falls apart when the working population drops - either due to demographics or because the world splinters apart and the age of global trading ends. Stonks are just as much IOUs as "pension points" are.
And no, automation isn't a panacea either, because an economy not just requires workers to do work, but also people having money to buy things - that's already setting our time's economy on fire as more and more people have to expend more and more money just to make rent.
> And no, automation isn't a panacea either, because an economy not just requires workers to do work, but also people having money to buy things
Automation is the whole reason people have money to buy things. Before we had automation everyone lived on farms and sewed their own clothes. Only noblemen could afford to pay for clothes. Your intuition is plain wrong, I'm sorry.
AI may take away purpose if it takes away literally everyone's jobs. The wealth and productivity of the economy doesn't go away. It becomes more concentrated. De-concentrating it is a political problem.
> Automation is the whole reason people have money to buy things. Before we had automation everyone lived on farms and sewed their own clothes. Only noblemen could afford to pay for clothes. Your intuition is plain wrong, I'm sorry.
Every industrial revolution to this day produced insane amounts of job losses and suffering. In fact, that's how we got the labor rights almost a century ago. Affected workers literally got shot up over labor action.
And I'm sick and tired of that cycle always repeating and governments not giving a single shit about helping affected people and redistributing the wealth gain.
> And I'm sick and tired of that cycle always repeating and governments not giving a single shit about helping affected people and redistributing the wealth gain.
You're right. And I suggested a way to make it happen this time.
Every industrial revolution to this day produced insane amounts of job losses and suffering.
(Shrug) Things were worse before. That's the part of the argument that the Luddites and their fellow travelers simply can't hand-wave their way out of.
This implies that at every stage, the best choice for the most people was to move ahead with the revolution, instead of trying to stop it.
> most European countries that operate in a redistribution system
The Netherlands does not. [1] It is also considered one of the best-run pension systems in the world.
> the current workers pay the pensions of the current pensioners in exchange for "IOU tokens", the US has everyone responsible for themselves
US Social Security works in the manner you described - current workers pay for current pensioners. This doesn't work great as we already know.
Making assets instead of workers pay for pensions isn't a bad idea per se. It makes no sense to load workers down with taxes to pay for seniors. The math only works as long as the population of workers grows or if you tax workers more and more.
Workers' labor produces ever-increasing surpluses every year. Use those surpluses aka higher productivity to support seniors.
One could feasibly make their debate topic that the U.S. is not actually a functioning country but instead has morphed into an extensive financialization scheme, and they could win that debate.
Pensions are not investment funds (for the individual employee/retiree). They are distinct from 401ks and their ilk. GP explicitly spoke about "pensions", which have almost no requirement to diversify - at least one I know of was discovered to be "invested" in luxury rugs and furniture for the CEO (Their value will go up!!! /s).
The entire industrialized world has the exact same problems with commercial real estate and rents for small businesses and people.
The common denominator across continents and political systems and economic factors and social factors: all the ownership is in the hand of the olds. Whether directly or indirectly through any kind of bank-and-funds-and-government schemes that can be dreamed up.
In the early 2000's I visited my sister's family in Australia. Hadn't seen them for a few years. I took the kids to Toys'r'us and gave them $200 each to spend. It was the best $400 I've ever spent in my life. They still talk about it.
Somehow giving $200 of Amazon credit doesn't feel the same :(
One of my daughters always asked to be taken to Toys-R-Us for one of her b-day presents so she could pick out something. Watching her walk around in wonder for an hour trying to decide was an even better present for me. I'm sad they're gone too.
I can only imagine the sheer delight in a kid that had never been to a dedicated toy store like Toys'r'us because of online shopping to see one for the first time. Sadly, many kids will never get to experience a toy store like that. I remember thinking what I'd do if I ever won that shopping spree that kids won on whatever Nickelodeon game show where that was the prize. I'd actually practice by learning where the things I wanted were in the store to be as efficient as possible.
People use block a lot there, not being rude, but just to curate their own feed so that it only has the stuff they want to see. There's a lot of left-wing and "woke" content, but that's a preference. If you don't lean that way, just start blocking and following to get the feed you want.
There's no algorithm, or any way to impose one, and no central control. It's a lightly modified ActivityPub protocol so you can always make your own client and server setup if you want.
I haven't seen any proper commercial spam yet, and the few MLM posts I've instantly blocked (I suspect hacked accounts). Since you only see who you follow, there's no way for a commercial account to get any reach - you'd have to pay someone with a lot of followers to boost your post to get it anywhere.
I make my own furniture. I am absolutely not a carpenter. But I hate Ikea furniture - it's made of shitty, flimsy, materials, and its design priorities are all based on cost and ease of transport, not on being great furniture that will last years and be an actual asset to the home.
This is an analogy, obviously. Ikea has been innovative, and it does provide a useful service for people; if you just moved into a new place and need to furnish it as quickly and cheaply as possible, then off to Ikea you go. But it's still shitty furniture.
My furniture doesn't look great, sometimes. My joinery is not perfect. I don't have all the tools I need to do this properly. But the design goals for each are what we need to live our lives. My wife has a stupidly high bed in her office, piled mattresses so she can spread them out if we have many visitors. I made her a bedside table that matches that height. It's a complete one-off; I won't make another that size, and we probably won't need it if we move house.
My point is that we already have this split in other areas of our lives; the Vimes Theory of boots (rich people buy boots that last generations, poor people buy boots every year). Ikea furniture. Buying a mass-produced crockery from a big store, or buying hand-made crockery from a local potter. We're just adding information and code to this split.
I’m not a furniture maker, but I have a rather close connection to the industry. I used to hate ikea furniture. In fact I hated almost all modern furniture that mass market, that wasn’t high end. I was a huge proponent of vintage furniture ( and still am), but I have really come around on ikea. They sure still make some crap, but they also make some genuinely innovative pieces that can last if you treat them with a basic level of care. I’d specifically call out / praise a few of their beds with built in drawer solutions. A few good desks too. They also have other mostly solid wood products too. It really depends. Just my $0.02.
Agreed. I was a carpenter for a long time and have built everything from completely disposable structures to things that ended up in Design Within Reach.
I think Ikea is great. Sure, the cheaper stuff consists of veneered particle board at best. But they (at least used to) use thicker veneers, often include relatively high quality hardware, and make some products that are just completely solid (stainless kitchen gear, simple but serviceable pine furniture, standing desks, some bedding).
What gets to me are places like West Elm and similar companies. Mid-Century design, but it's the same veneered particle board as the much cheaper Ikea stuff, and costs far more.
Many of Ikea's wood (wood-like?) products are pretty flimsy, designed to be built once and never moved or taken apart. (cough - all cupboards, most cabinets - cough)
But somewhat ironically their steel kitchenware is competitive with catering equipment. It may not be as well designed for maximum functionality and storage packing efficiency, but costs about the same or even less than comparable Vogue gear. Over the years I've spotted an increasing number of street food vendors using Ikea bowls and trays, so the price and availability advantage appears to be real.
Billy bookshelves seem pretty good even though they are veneered board of some kind. I have several and they have lasted many years (eve ones bought second hand) and moves. Not the best, but not terrible and great value for money.
The cubical storage units are pretty solid and practical.
On the other hand the IKEA wardrobe I have is falling to pieces.
> What gets to me are places like West Elm and similar companies. Mid-Century design, but it's the same veneered particle board as the much cheaper Ikea stuff, and costs far more.
Somewhat similar to what I was thinking. In the UK John Lewis sell (or used to) sell bookshelves very similar to a Billy (in construction and appearance depending on the veneer) at three times the price.
Agree completely. As I said, Ikea provide a valuable service. And I'm sure that for some pieces, quality is compatible with the core design values of cost and transportability.
And, to extend the analogy, I'm sure Google's AI results will be perfectly serviceable for some people in some situations.
But for my wife's odd, non-standard, situation I had to build it myself. And for some people's odd, non-standard, situation they'll need to construct (or find) a bespoke information service that matches their needs. That will probably cost them more and the joinery won't be as neat.
I want to buy you a CMOT Dibbler Sausage for the Vimes reference. Perfect metaphor for this situation. His point was that it was the cheap boots that keep people poor, so that makes me think artist and artisan patronage will be an even bigger thing in years to come.
A lot of their furniture now has warnings that it must be secured to the wall - for that very reason. On their (Norwegian) website, this starts with furniture around 100cm tall, especially if it is talland thin or sits on legs.
I guess the change (and recalls) are a result of lawsuits from that same dresser.
Ikea has long existed before the Internet and over capitalization.
I have several Ikea pieces in my home, and I've had some for over a decade. If you build Ikea stuff properly, are selective in what you purchase, and use wood glue when constructing, then it lasts as long as anything else really.
Their flat packed designs are actually innovative. People can outfit an entire room by using a Honda Fit to transport.
Agree completely, as I said their design priorities are cost and transportability, and they provide a valuable service. Mostly I hate the shitty laminated chipboard half their stuff is made from. If you replaced that with actual wood, and some of the weird aluminium pegs with actual dowels or joinery, it'd be fine. But that's kinda beside the point; if you did that it would be more expensive and less easily transported, and therefore wouldn't fit their priorities.
And, of course, their bedside cabinets are the wrong size for my wife's bed, so I'd have to make one anyway.
And this is just an analogy; if you like Ikea-style Google Search, then great for you. I pay for Kagi because that Ikea-style Google Search doesn't work for me.
The really rich people that I know of drive 10-year-old beaten-up Land Rovers, though.
I think there's a nouveau-riche slice of folks who buy "luxury" cars thinking that they confer status. There are brands like this in every industry, that adopt all the pointers of "luxury" except actual quality.
There was a study sometime back that suggested most American millionaires live in homes of modest or at least unostentatious size and drive used cars of American make. These days it'd probably be of Japanese make, as Toyotas and Nissans are relatively cheap and last forever. Having a lot of money and showing the world that you have a lot of money are completely different goals. You'll be flat broke if you join an MLM with 99.5% certainty, but if you're a good enough salesperson they'll loan out a Mercedes or something to drive around so you can show off how rich the plan made you and "edify your upline". You're on the hook for fuel and maintenance, though.
Maybe it's the Scots-Irish in him, but my father was always one to go for the luxury stuff, but still seek out the good quality stuff at as good a price as he can manage and fix it up if it were broken. He knows how to keep a Cadillac Eldorado on the road for 20 years or more, so of course he's going to spring for the fancy if a used one turns up at a good price. In the 80s he bought a small mansion that was in a quasi-dilapidated state but had been standing since the opening years of the 20th century. We renovated it inside and out, and today it's on the National Register of Historic Places (though my parents no longer live there).
> still seek out the good quality stuff at as good a price as he can manage and fix it up if it were broken.
I think that's a nice story to highlight, being able to do things well and preserving that knowledge
While there can be benefits for mass producing things, what actually is produced is going to be limited by what techniques are conducive to automation. So the techniques that are hard to automate are lost from the market of provided goods and then human capital for it also gets lost (can't think of any concrete examples off the top of my head, but maybe the techniques for some elements of clothing that are now only found in couture/custom pieces). Another related idea is how there are much fewer color variations in manufactured goods now, simply because it simplifies the mass manufacturing process.
> can't think of any concrete examples off the top of my head, but maybe the techniques for some elements of clothing that are now only found in couture/custom pieces
Maybe how clothes used to come with a decent margin on the hems so you could alter them, but now they don't?
I don't have direct experience with Hondas, but I'm sure they're fantastic. My mom had a Nissan in the late 90s that she got with 100,000 miles on it and put another 100,000 miles on it before getting rid of it.
My admiration of Honda and Toyota comes from their hybrid offerings, probably the most practical kind of car to get.
EVs have the charging requirement, so it’s a lifestyle / home setup adjustment. Plus, other trade-offs like being way heavier due to the battery, and higher risk of being totaled if the battery pack is even slightly damaged.
Slight aside: I only recently learned how much easier it is to total an EV. A small accident can be fine for a gas car, but for an EV, if it does anything to the battery, and requires replacing the battery or going deep inside to try and figure out what’s wrong with it, it’s just not worth it anymore, and gets declared totaled by the insurance company. Not great! Felt it was worth including in my expected cost calculation for whether or not to get an EV.
And regular cars haven’t gotten MPG improvements in years.
So I have a good impression of the hybrid technologies they’ve developed!
Though their electrification strategy seems completely different.
Toyota/Lexus I think are in the hybrid lineup still. Whereas Honda went full electrification and shut down a lot of production so as to refit their factories. I believe one of the reasons that Honda sales plummeted recently, since they had just ramped down production.
Maybe that technology will be lost someday, I wonder how well-documented it is and if it’d be easy to ramp back up
I see this in my village. There is a good mix of private and social housing. The private houses tend to have modest cars whereas the social houses have something flash.
Do you think that AI could actually free up time in your life in other areas, so that you could spend more time doing the things you love like making furniture? Or maybe help you directly in your furniture-making, by perhaps helping you to research things?
Please don't misunderstand: my point is not "AI is good."
It is problematic in many ways. My point is that I think the "AI versus actually doing cool human-crafted stuff" split is... a misguided, maybe even harmful, mental model of a more complicated reality.
That's the promise of every new technology. Although there's been massive progress over the past 50+ years, the amount of free time that people have has actually gone DOWN (https://clockify.me/working-hours)..."I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes"...we'll see
> Do you think that AI could actually free up time in your life in other areas, so that you could spend more time doing the things you love.
Personally, I don’t believe that would be the case. Jevon’s paradox mixed with the natural tendency to exploit others.
One could argue that technology -in general- didn’t really save people time by itself, it’s regulation - a social construct, and I am counting both cultural and legal enforcement of them as well- that did. Just look at how workers in countries without your European-style protections fare. Wikipedia’s article on the Chinese 996 [1] has a nice map for deaths due to long working hours by country, notice the dominant colours for each quadrant of this (projected) globe.
Pre industrialised societies’ labourers were limited by daylight and travel distance. The modern availability and abundance of artificial lighting, mechanised transportation, and telecommunication means their grand kids are expected to -and often do- toil every waking moment.
What time is AI going to free up for me? Can AI go to the grocery store for me, do my laundry, do my dishes? Can it let me clock out early? The spoils of AI do not go to individuals
It's not AI, but there's Doordash and Rinse if that's what you're trying to optimize for. The robots will be coming out, soon enough, and then we're all in trouble though.
I think in a different society this could have been the case (possibly, assuming the hype is somewhat true).
But the way society is structured now? We still live in feudalism, just uplifted to modern levels of ”comfort” (if you take of your western glasses and look at the whole world. There are still people living in medieval conditions today in some places in the world).
The way it’s going it’s only going to make rich people richer, and give them more power to control this system and perpetuate it. I don’t see that drastically changing anytime soon, unless we do something about it on a societal level.
Direct consequence of industrial revolution was an INCREASE in workload. People worked MORE, not less. It required organization, protests, political pressure and even some bloodshed to get 8 hrs workday.
People that push for AI are not interested in making your life better.
No, because the machine consumes all of your time that it can take without literally killing you. If you manage to free some time somewhere, the machine will adapt and eat it up. We have so-called developed countries talking about raising the retirement age and cutting holidays, that's the "future" we are living in.
I don’t disagree with your overall point but developed countries are raising their retirement ages because they’re trying to stave off pension crises. It’s the surprising alternative to taxing corporations and the ultra-wealthy appropriately.
> But I hate Ikea furniture - it's made of shitty, flimsy, materials, and its design priorities are all based on cost and ease of transport, not on being great furniture that will last years and be an actual asset to the home.
I have seen/heard this a lot lately, but all the Ikea furniture I have ever had has been great. Among others, had a chair that was good for like 11 years lol
I think this is actually a counter-example of what you think it is.
Chairs should last generations. A chair lasting 11 years is not exemplary. A chair falling apart after a few years should be the exception, and a bad thing at that.
Again, Vimes Theory: rich folks inherit furniture that their grandparents bought, and maybe need to get it re-upholstered once in their lifetime. Poor folks have to pay for new furniture every few years because it falls apart.
My parents bought some really nice modern furniture when they married in the early 1960s. 5 houses and 60 years later (and a few re-upholsterings), it still looks and works as beautifully as ever. My brother will probably inherit it in a few years, then his kids; it will likely get another 60 years at least.
One of my friends has a kitchen table her great grandmother owned.
Neither of us (or our parents) are rich, but good, well made furniture used to be an investment. Now most furniture is disposable.
> Chairs should last generations. A chair lasting 11 years is not exemplary. A chair falling apart after a few years should be the exception, and a bad thing at that.
IDK, this feels to me more like an aspiration or desire about what furniture quality should generally be, and not really a description of what most furniture is actually like.
> rich folks inherit furniture that their grandparents bought, and maybe need to get it re-upholstered once in their lifetime.
I get that this is beside the point, but IDK why anyone would want their grandparents' furniture, aside from maybe a few choice really nice, antique-ish things. If I was "rich", I would rather buy my own furniture for the most part...
Stuff that has lasted two generation will be antique-ish (if not actually antique) and usually nice. It will have the quality it should, rather than the quality most furniture has.
All my grandparents' furniture is properly jointed and made of good wood.
I work on a ton of different stuff, and this clause comes up for every job. I get them to remove it, or I don't accept the job offer.
For me, this is a red/green flag on management. The clause is legal boilerplate, inserted because it's standard and they can. They don't actually care that much about anything you might build outside of work. If they won't (or can't) remove it then the organisation is inflexible and the people who are hiring me have no power within it. Or the people who are hiring me don't understand my point of view. This is a bad sign either way.
I have had one "win" with it; I worked for a company run by a trio of absolute arseholes. One of them called a meeting and tried to bully me into handing over one of my projects because of this clause. I explained that my contract didn't have that clause because they removed it before I signed it. He got angry. But couldn't actually do anything about it.
> remove it then the organisation is inflexible and the people who are hiring me have no power within it
Bingo. That’s my assessment as well, usually this stage is where any company tries to show their best behavior, good way to filter out the bad ones. But surprisingly it’s getting very common, contracts used to be before a one pager stating the salary and some other benefits, right now it’s a submission contract, and setting up the power dynamics before you even do anything. Another contract I turned down was also full of questionable clauses (like you should work more than 48h a week when needed, overriding the common law with maximum 48hrs, and up to interpretation: “needed”), and none of the benefits discussed were written there, not even a reference to XYZ internal policy or similar, meanwhile, they had so much written against you not just while doing the work but even after you leave, that they could ruin your future career if they chose to. I believe there should be a federal centralized system govern these contracts and ensure each contract is in compliance, easy to implement by having a contract builder that add clauses to it while giving margin to each party to customize other clauses to their liking. Otherwise, a lot of people will get exploited, that contract I had with that company they refused to change anything justified by it being a “template”.. it doesn’t feel like a contract anymore since contracts are made to be negotiated, it feels like signing up for a SaaS service where if you don’t agree to the entirety of it, you are out, except for jobs you’re not the customer.
> contract I had with that company they refused to change anything justified by it being a “template”
yeah that's the thing. Firstly, that's not how templates work. Secondly, that's not how contracts work. And if they won't or can't change it, then what does that say about the rest of your experience working there?
As for non-competes. They are illegal in some places. And unenforceable. But there's a difference between "technically unenforceable" and "they're still going to take you to court and you have to defend that, which is expensive".
The core of hand-to-hand combat is feinting - persuading you are going to hit your opponent in one place, so they move their defences to that place, and then hitting them in another place. That's a simple mechanic that could be translated easily into cards or any other bluffing format.
It gets more interesting with animals (who don't feint much) and large monsters (who don't need to feint because their attacks will overwhelm your defences), so dodging and armour come into it then.
But that brings up hit points, which are a ridiculous mechanic for modelling all of this. Stabbing someone in the arm or in the gut is completely different, it has very different effects, and should be modelled differently.
And this is where the rabbit-hole takes over and it gets too complicated ;)
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