I’m not American, nor do I own a timeshare, but weren’t timeshares scams in and of themselves? I remember reading about them about 15~20 years ago.
Targeting victims of previous scams is common in crypto and MLM circles. The trick is almost always promising them an out of their previous losses with a new venture and this venture is sold to them on the basis of them being ‘experienced’ or ‘knowledgeable’ about the previous venture.
My friend's wife attended a timeshare presentation and, unfortunately, she ended up signing. She thought she got a great deal - "We can go to Hawaii twice-per-year, and pay far less than staying at a hotel!" Well, almost immediately, they started receiving invoices with outrageous charges, like "maintenance fees" and dubious property taxes. The original contract was for $200/month, but all the additional charges brought the cost to around $2000/month. They tried to get out of the contract. The timeshare company wouldn't return their calls. Finally, after a few months they talked to someone who told them there was no getting out of the contract - basically, "Sorry, you signed a contract."
My friend and his wife ended up declaring bankruptcy, just to get out of the timeshare contract. They never even went to the timeshare. Not once.
That story seems to be missing some pieces. Most people would just refuse to pay the invoices and wait for the timeshare company to sue. I suspect your friends might have had other financial problems beyond just the timeshare.
It's a long flight, but it's not an unreasonably expensive flight. Especially if you live in a place with winter, it might be nice to visit in novemberish and marchish to get a warm week in between your cold at home. There's lots of people who live near me and visit Hawaii once a year.
Personally, I'd be more likely to do a two week stay than two one week stays, I'd rather reduce my time on an airplane. But leaving for two weeks is harder than leaving for one for all sorts of reasons.
Also, like, how do you even handle the resentment?
Odds are you're just staying with tourists most of the time, and whenever you do need to deal with the locals you have to ignore their thinly-veiled contempt mixed with self-loathing for depending on your patronage.
I hear it gets kind of awkward for Paris people getting summer homes in Britanny. I'm pretty sure the degree of hostility towards mainland Americans getting winter homes in Hawai must be much higher.
Some of them are “points-based” and you can spend your points at different resorts that they own and hypothetically have some flexibility in time but “points” should be a bad smell, see
Where they actually cheat to help you get enough points that you think you could win them when they stop cheating the game is unwinnable. If the cops show up they will see the carnie playing ‘honestly’ and not see anything wrong. In terms of psychology it is the king of scams.
In the case of the timeshare schemes you will find all sorts of problems and limitations when you try to redeem your points, it is like the limitations on airline frequent flier points but raised to the Nth power.
They cover that in their sales pitch. There's supposedly a market for trading timeshares, so you can trade in your timeshare for someone else's, specially if you have a highly coveted one
Of course none of it is as easy as they make it sound.
Right. "Supposedly." I've always avoided options that more or less locked me into a single ___location.
I do go up to my dad's--now brother's--place in Maine a few times a year but that's as much for family as having a need to go to a specific ___location. Absent family, I'd probably even vary that a bit.
It’s pretty sweet if you’re on the west coast and you have young kids. Extremely high chance of a good, relaxing time for everyone, and it’s a non stop flight for most people. Plus, many people take multiple vacations in a year.
Even from the west coast it's a 6 hr flight. Combined with time difference, it often means 2 days on travelling alone. Even worse for people in mid west or near west coast, which is the majority of where the population is [0]. For most people I know, Hawaii is a trip once every few years, and definitely not twice a year.
This is a week vacation though, not a weekend. I agree it doesn't work for a weekend, but if you take a full week off things look much better. If you really do want to go to that exact place in Hawaii for one week a year every year for the rest of your life a timeshare is a great deal (assuming the fees are as stated, sometimes what looks like $100/month turns out to be $2000/month) - but I don't know many people who vacation like that. I do plan to go back to Hawaii, but I also have vacation plans for Boston, Florida, California, Spain... Even the people I know who do vacation like that don't do it for life (I make regular trips to visit my in-laws, but they are thinking about moving states so I may have already taken my last visit to their current home)
In the end, the best case a timeshare does save money. However for most people the restrictions mean you are never in the best case and often you are in the worst case and lose money.
Isn't there usually some cooldown period for contracts like these? Or is that not a US thing? Any sales contract that I have signed in the past came with a 15-30 day cooldown period, where if I change my mind I can cancel no matter what.
I had to do it once where I caved under the pressure of a particularly aggressive "life insurance" salesperson, only realized my mistake a day after signing, so I called them up and exercised my right to "cool down".
> and they'll do everything in their power to dodge your attempts to use it.
A gym I was interested in joining had a pay-for-one-month deal, so I said, “sure, why not?” Their system took my e-signature for authorizing the one-time credit card transaction and copied (forged) it onto a shitty gym contract with auto-renewal and a bunch of other terms I didn’t agree to.
Fortunately, my state had a 3-day right of recision, so I followed the requirements in the law to the letter. It only required written notification that I’m exercising my right, so I printed a letter as such, brought a notary friend and another friend as witness, and hand-delivered it to the manager on duty and asked them to sign a receipt for it (which was witnessed and notarized). They tried to give me all kinds of crap about “the company cancellation process,” which I said is great and all, but not applicable because state law trumps company policy and state law says that as of 30 seconds ago our contract never existed. They ultimately relented, especially since they were nervous about the forgery aspect too.
Timeshares / Vacation Clubs (they are basically the same thing) are massive scams. They use tricky math, high pressure sales tactics, etc. to push people who can't afford it into taking out massive loans to pay into contracts they can basically never get out of.
I went to a vacation club presentation for a bunch of free stuff once, it wasn't worth it. But its crazy the things they push onto you. They make up numbers on how expensive vacations are to pressure people into thinking they have a deal. Then they try and sell a huge package ($50k+) and to push people into a 20%+ APR loan. Then if you do sign, they stick monthly fees on top of it in perpetuity.
Its a bad idea, but I could see how people that don't have a sharp eye and a mathematical maturity might fall for it.
Went to one once, one of the kids pooped. It was a bad one. The sales team wanted to keep going even as they enveloped by an incredibly thick stinky pungent hazardous stench. Real focus, reminded me of the movie quote “ABC always be closing.” Was interesting to be on the receiving end, a lot to study and not just the offers of “amazing places” but more so in terms of presentation and tactics. Leave your pocket book at home but everyone should experience one. (Oh yeah, didn’t sign of course, the rental locations were all on air bnb but cheaper and with none of the extra fees that they would have charged forever. Ha. Woops.)
The ABC thing is very evident when you are on the end of it. Every excuse to keep you there and try to get you to sign, they have a response for it. No money? We have loans. Bad credit? Lets get a cosigner. Anything to keep you there or to sign.
Not sure about other cultures, but Americans lives in general I think would be a bit less stressful if there wasn't some weird aversion to just saying 'no' to things you don't want to do, rather than reaching for excuses. Is it seen as rude? I much prefer the directness of it on the receiving end, but maybe I'm weird.
It's actually the opposite. People don't really take no for an answer anymore, and that's doubly true of anyone trying to sell you stuff, so instead of saying "no/ will not", we try to justify why we "cannot/are physically unable to" to stop the onslaught.
Like canceling cable, home internet. It's not that we're using something else, not using it at all, don't want it. It's "we're moving/going to jail for 5 years/dying Thursday and thus cannot continue using this service"
I had a door to door salesman ask if I was racist after I told him I wasn't interested, as if to try to pressure me into proving I wasn't a racist by listening to his pitch/buying into whatever he was selling. It's gotten to the point where I have a video door bell so know when I can skip it all by not answering//pretending I'm not home.
If they don't take the polite "no", immediately reach for insults. People who intentionally annoy you don't deserve civility - they're not showing any themselves.
My personal favorites is along the lines of: "Are you hard of hearing, you stupid clown?" - no overly foul language and safe to use in most company.
Few will try selling stuff to someone hurling nothing but insults at them. There's really only one group of people this doesn't work on, and they're the bottom of the barrel trying to find victims on public transport and the like. If you figure out a way to reliably get rid of them, let me know!
Funnily enough, this reminds me of my Dad's approach years back. After he said no and they'd start again, he'd say "oh sorry, are ya deaf or dumb, boy?" in a way you couldn't tell if he was joking or not.
They'd usually be speechless or say 'neither', and he'd explain that he already said no, so they must either be hard of hearing or their brain's not processing it. Always caught them off guard. I don't remember if it was effective or not in getting them to go away, oddly enough.
Indeed. Even if this worked 95% of the time, that 5% where it escalates things just isn't worth it IMO. Also, pissing people off that know where you live isn't a great idea.
It's basically WarGames. The only winning move is not to play. I don't answer the door when I'm certain it's a salesman. I don't make eye contact/respond to the ones that are setup outside of a store. Same with the ones setup in malls/stores (looking at you, Costco).
Read the room and maybe don't do it to that unhinged looking guy from the subway.
Personally I enjoy a bit of excitement, but most people don't want confrontation, which is why appearing confrontational before they're committed works for making them do a u-turn quickly.
The internet companies have mobile offerings now to push on you when you move. I thought while recently moving it would be a quick call to disconnect and still got a retention sales pitch...
It's been a few years and I can't recall. Probably renting solar panels? That was a popular one for a while. Not that it matters, he could have been offering me free money. What matters is he didn't respect my right to say no. That's an extreme accusation to lob just to prevent the conversation from ending.
To qualify my previous comment, it's not that saying no is seen as rude, it's that salesmen are beyond rude if you try to say no. I have to hide in my home, pretend I'm renting/house sitting, etc because it's less hassle than opening the door and saying no.
> the rental locations were all on air bnb but cheaper and with none of the extra fees that they would have charged forever
Exactly! Came here to echo this. I have family that got roped into this arrangement and the annual maintenance fees (and other misc fees at every turn) coupled with the up-front cost is absolutely ridiculous when compared to just booking an AirBnB/VRBO/etc for a couple weeks.
Also agree on sitting through one with zero intention to sign, once. It's a unique experience, and I feel like most people not already doing sales/marketing professionally might learn something from it.
I’d be vary wary of going even if you have zero intention of being sucked in. They’re literally trained and adept at exactly those kinds of people - so don’t go unless you can sign over a durable power of attorney to someone offsite for the duration.
I ran a similar experiment many years ago, not with a timeshare but with a multi-level marketing scheme. The tactics they used were very similar. I kept saying no and they kept inventing new reasons for me to sign up. I finally got bored and said no, thanks, I'm done, and walked out--but even then they were trying new reasons on me until I got out the door.
I haven't tried this (yet), but I read that pointing out how much more cheaply one could get a timeshare on eBay gets you an immediate out from the negotiation process.
Timeshares on eBay are crazy cheap by comparison. A timeshare in Hawaii during prime season can be had for $50k or something like that, which sounds like a lot until you realize that the vacation clubs will sell that timeshare for, like, $500k.
I went to one of those timeshare presentations before just because the free prize for sitting through it was especially desirable.
My impression is that they were heavily targeting people who were bad at math. Every time I ran the numbers (I had a lot of opportunities while trapped in the room waiting for the prize counter to open) it just made no sense whatsoever. Beyond the amount you were overpaying for the apartment, the fees we so expensive that you could vacation on what you would have been paying in fees for a long time. The fees didn't even get you much, you still had to do all of the cleaning and a lot of the maintenance as they were not included. The fees only really covered exterior maintenance and mowing the lawns, and were about two or three orders of magnitude higher than they should be for those services if you assumed every unit in the complex was paying them 52 times a year.
Timeshares as a concept could in theory work, but the entire industry consists of grifters far more focused on getting rich than providing a service to their customers. It is ironic that the primary focus of the presentations is how expensive it would be to take a beach vacation every year, which is true, and how timeshares in concept could make this much more affordable, which is also true, but then they show you the numbers and the reality is completely opposite.
Free weekend vacation at Disney World, including admission to the parks. You actually stayed in one of the timeshare units they were trying to sell. The presentation was about 3 hours long, and mostly consisted of a high pressure sales pitch full of dubious claims. The salesguys were not impressed by the math.
I think the prizes I've seen are generally in the range of $300-600 cash value. To get it you have to sit through the hardest and most annoying sales pitch imaginable. I did it once. I was never tempted even slightly to buy their scam, but it was so miserable to sit through that it's not something I'd ever do again.
After some negotiation (don’t settle for the first "prize" they offer you) I got a free flight and hotel to Orlando, FL and I used the time to visit the Air Force Missile Museum at Cape Canaveral (at the time, I had a badge that let me get on base to visit the museum).
You do need to be prepared for a hard sell. They are clearly making money otherwise they wouldn’t fly me around the country.
Calling something a scam can just mean they profit off highly immoral behavior or are inherently deceptive. Loan sharks are scams. Pyramid schemes were scams, even when they weren't illegal.
I've never seen a single timeshare that makes sense in terms of cost to value ratio. There's always a more flexible/cheaper/profitable way to do whatever it is you're trying to do than a timeshare, unless of course you're the one selling it. Very fair to call it a scam.
In a “Vacation club” you own a bag of “points” that you can use to book a unit at a resort. You are not guaranteed that units will be available, nor are you guaranteed a price (i.e. how many points you’ll have to use). You will have to pay for points every year no matter what.
True “shared ownership of a single unit at a resort” is far less common these days.
> but probably still a better deal than owning a full vacation home that sits empty most of the year
If you can walk away: then 100% yes. I've considered a timeshare at a ski resort during the popular school vacation week.
The problem is that often you can't walk away. IE, with a vacation home, you can sell it; or otherwise default on the mortgage / taxes. With a timeshare, that's harder.
Personally, I just stay in hotels. So much easier, and the hotel bill is cheaper than whatever monthly payment the timeshare / vacation home is.
Also that sort of specific time is an issue for this type of arrangement. Because large share of participants would want the same time. Which unless they share the places during stay...
In the end just buying it piece meal is most likely best option.
> but probably still a better deal than owning a full vacation home that sits empty most of the year
Timeshares give up a lot of the advantages of just owning a vacation home, without many advantages other than price.
You have even less control of the property than a coop/condo, you don't get the financial incentive of possible real estate appreciation, there is no real liquid open market for resale.. etc.
Time shares are like a casino where the house always wins. They control the costs/fees the same way a casino controls the odds/payouts. They are probably less regulated than a casino too.
The other advantage to a proper vacation home is.. if its a beach / ski / whatever place whatever, you leave all your gear there, changes of clothes, etc.. not hauling stuff.
I doubt it. You have the loan interest, annual service fees, and fact that you don’t have a sellable asset, at least for anything like what you paid for it. An empty vacation home is still an appreciating asset. Not a good investment in my circumstances but still better than a timeshare.
What is most amazing is that there is an entire industry of getting people out of timeshares. It's not cheap either. People are willing to pay large sums and take big losses for millstone removal. Timeshare companies pay a lot for every single successful sign up, so they are not willing to let them go without a fight.
Of course, these are not well advertised. And it contradicts the sales pitch of the timeshare maintaining / increasing in value if you are simply giving it back for free.
Yes but when most won’t let your heirs get out of the contract even that’s the problem. In principle they make sense, Disneys for example has got to be the least scammy of them.
Checked a little bit Disney. Picking a flexible option for a large family:
From $350 to $1,200 per month for a 10-year loan with a 10% down payment = $144,117
+ the annual fees.
Oh well...
"Ability to finance through our in house financing with no credit check" errrrm.
"A groundbreaking non-credit check model for financing DVC loans. No credit check, no debt-to-income ratios, simply financed based on the value of your purchase."
Though if you purchase from the secondary market ( = people reselling it), it gets cheap enough that it becomes interesting.
Resell is the real value, but you need to make sure you understand the limitations to benefits as only people that have bought enough points directly get access to certain benefits such as lounges.
And really the whole thing only makes sense if you pay upfront without a loan.
I've priced it out a few times and for me it doesn't make sense despite staying at WDW ~ 4+ weeks a year.
But when compared to other timeshares, it's not a total lock in and Disney has apparently started buying back contracts if you wanted out.
Yes, you can but people that can afford vacation homes often let them sit empty and lose a lot of money because they don’t want anyone messing with it- it is expensive, and loses a ton of money but they can afford it.
You can rent out timeshares on Redweek. I've never used the service but it's often recommended to timeshare owners who are unable to stay in their timeshare properties.
Only if you're lucky enough to own it in a place that hasn't outlawed AirBNB rentals yet.
You didn't hear it from me but the scheme is: an individual or group of investors will buy several properties to AirBNB in a moderately-popular vacation spot. Typically someplace fairly rural and off the beaten path. But desirable enough for photos that might trend briefly on pinterest. Then they (rather covertly) drum up local support for banning AirBNBs, while being careful to make sure their existing rentals are grandfathered in. Now their investments have a moat and they can charge whatever they want for them, especially if there are no hotels or resorts anywhere nearby.
That seems like a risky ploy. Guaranteeing that the existing AirBNBs get grandfathered in is far from certain. Then again, I've seen plenty of AirBNBs that just ignore the law so maybe it would be fine anyway. I once stayed in one that had explicit instructions on how to respond if someone asked you what you were doing at the house, which fake names to use and everything. Felt incredibly sketchy, but it was also about a third of the price of the cheapest hotel room in the area and didn't have cleaning fees or extensive checkout cleaning bullshit so that wasn't unexpected. Was a great ___location too.
Not really.
They are cheaper in nominal dollar terms (capital, annual costs, etc) but you are typically paying multiples of that intrinsic value of the property (e.g. 2 weeks $100K up front, $5k year, but for a property that might be $1m not $2.4m and definitely doesn’t cost $120k a year to maintain) plus you get no appreciation upside, no tax benefits etc…
They aren't all scams, but they are not an "investment". As long as you understand the program terms and restrictions and you buy your timeshare in a place you'd go anyway, you can get good value out of the money.
But few people do that much research and find out that they don't use it as much as they thought they would either because they don't like the place enough to keep going back, or they didn't account for blackout dates, floating weeks, etc and can't find a time when they can go.
But if you do buy a timeshare, by on the secondary market, don't buy a new one, they quickly drop in value on resale.
They are all scams, because they all lock you into a single-vendor maintenance contract that can charge you anything they want, that you can never get out of.
Theoretically you can run a non-scammy timeshare, but why would you, when running a scam is the same work but so much more lucrative? The lemons push out the good ones in this market.
> They are all scams, because they all lock you into a single-vendor maintenance contract that can charge you anything they want, that you can never get out of.
This is simply factually incorrect. While I myself would never own a timeshare because it just would never make sense for me, some timeshare contracts are for limited lengths (e.g. 20 years) and maintenance fees are capped.
Kind of. Timeshare sales are famous for their high-pressure sales tactics (see the famous South Park episode), so there would be an assumption that these people are susceptible to these tactics.
The issue is less that timeshares are outright scams (though some are), but it's that buyers are locked into a very long term contract that is difficult and expensive to get out off. What may have seemed like a great idea to take the kids on an annual beach vacation now becomes a PITA when those kids are teenagers and now don't want to go on trips with their parents.
So with timeshare owners you have (a) people likely susceptible to high pressure sales tactics who (b) are likely highly motivated to get out of their contract. So a perfect target for scammers.
My parents had various timeshares and got good holidays from them and were generally happy, so I don’t think they are by default a scam.
We still go to one 30 years later, and the maintenance is about 1/3 of what you’d pay for an equivalent hotel room (€1,000 vs €3,000) so I think overall they are “up”.
My parents bought into Worldmark by Wyndham and they or us kids used it a ton, and the facilities were all pretty nice, so there are some that work out well.
Timeshares are very much scammy. What sucks is that it's all legal. If anything, the law -- the ones that protect the interests of real estate owners and lenders -- is used to lock people into making payments that are very difficult to get out of.
They’re notorious and have been featured in tons of episodes of TV shows (including a particularly good early-ish episode of South Park, among more-ordinary sitcoms and such) since at least the 90s. They’re a punch line.
My parents nonetheless fell for one in the early 20-teens. How they had missed this particular bit of common wisdom, I have no idea.
I am very sorry to hear that and I hope they can properly escape this situation.
Maybe my opinion is biased (the media generally does not publish "everythibg is a-OK" articles), but my perception of the timeshare escape industry is that they are sketchy too.
I think this Last Week Tonight episode is very informative on the topic:
I’d say it’s not enough to satisfy early investors, who probably want a 10~50x return before IPO. They could definitely go public if they wanted to, and do ‘well’.
I also disagree with his take that the Kernel could be replicated in Rust by 6 motivated volunteers in 4 or 5 years. That could be said of many projects, you could probably reproduce AAA entertainment software with such a team in such a span of time, but the trick is getting these people to stay on track, fed, and satisfied for that time. Who's going to pay for their rent/mortgages? Are they just not going to work for the duration?
It's naive grandstanding in the best of cases, and malicious proselytizing in the worst.
You are misrepresenting the original article. Drew did not say six volunteers or 4 or 5 years. Those are your numbers, so feel free to agree to disagree with yourself.
A Linux kernel clone is the epitome of a large Rust community project (for many reasons, some noble, some not so noble). It would likely pull in hundreds if not thousands of developers in an arms race assuming the end goal is well defined.
Nobody claims it's a small task, but I believe it can probably be accomplished. Particularily in the scope of the original claim "applied to a new Linux-compatible OS we could have something production ready for some use-cases within a few years."
I disagree. There is already a project for a Rust OS, and its been around for years and I don't even know if it'll actually function on real hardware or just in VMs.[1] Or even enough to matter. There is already a project, where are the hundreds, if not thousands, of developers?
But that's not the project discussed in the article.
Now I'm not saying I agree, but his premise was a Linux-compatible kernel, which Redox most definitely is not. Redox explicitly does not intend to be POSIX, has its own custom (in-house) filesystem, desktop environment, and is a microkernel as well. A better comparison for Redox would be Hurd, not Linux.
This isn't a Linux kernel clone. The whole argument is that producing a "bug-by-bug compatible" Linux kernel clone should be much easier to pull off than a "research kernel" where you may get lost in exploring design dead ends.
Or, the original claim: How small a team, and how quickly?
Sure, the Linux development process was inefficient. There were a lot of false directions and dead ends and things that were OK ideas but were superseded by better ideas. If you know the destination, you can drive straight there without all the wandering around.
But, fine, how inefficient was the development process? 90% wandering around? It probably wasn't 99% wandering around. So you're going to need something like 10% of the man-hours that went into Linux.
You say Rust is more productive? How much more? Maybe a factor of two? OK, you need 5% of the man-hours that went into Linux, over the last 20+ years.
That's still not a small team and quickly, no matter how you slice it.
I don't know where that image is from, so you are working on information I do not have, but still, the first "paragraph" sets up a possibility reinforced by an anecdote in the second. It's not asserting that only 5 contributors could re-create the entirety of the Linux kernel in 5 years.
I very much took his argument as an open-source project with a small number of leaders, with the help of the larger OSS community, could make a mature subset of a Linux compatible kernel in a small amount of time (years)
nanos wrote a quite reasonable subset of the linux kernel in C using less than 5 people at a time on average and somewhat less than 5 years. this can totally be done.
> Nanos aims to be a much more secure system than Linux. It does this through several thrusts. Not having the notion of users, running a single process per vm, and limiting the amount of code that is incorporated into each vm.
> 2. Minimalist:
> KISS. As Nanos is not intended to be ran on bare metal we strive to keep the core as simple as possible.
How do the current Rust/Linux maintainers pay their rent?
Also your estimate for AAA game development is massively optimistic, AAA team sizes are in the hundreds today (not a good thing for quality and innovation, but that's how it is).
I can't give you a complete answer, just partial stuff I am aware of
1. Rust fanboys poping up on other language topic and shitting on them and promoting Rust
2. Ton of low quality promotion, like you would get on HN crap like TODO application in Rust, and the Rust community would just upvote and promote this low level 1 weekend project just because is Rust
3. RIR rewrite it in rust, toxic Rust fans would popup on projects communities and demand to rewrite it in rust, or why is this not in Rust, or I would contribute if you rewrite it in rust.
I am not sure why this community is so toxic, I do not remember Java,Python to have this problem, I suspect that the toxic part is just a portion of the developers but the community of Rust devs did not manage to keep the toxic people in check.
But honestly use a search engine and find more details, I am avoiding this kind of drama so I do not have latest gossip (just seen a link here that the ladybird devs also called the Rust people toxic , probably because they are butt hurt that people are making a more popular browser then their Rust alternatives)
I’m waiting on Panasonic (Panasonic, was it?) to act on their trademark to have interactive ads on their TVs. You have to yell a product name or marketing keyword (McDonalds! PlayStation!) out loud if you want the ad to stop. It stays if you can’t or don’t yell :)
Personalized advertisements exist because all-sites exist.
Facebook isn’t a pets/cars/vexillology site, it’s an all-site; it and its kin are designed to contain almost all of humanity’s interests. It stands to reason that all manner of ads would fit in there, and in order to make these ads useful you need to filter or target them. If you see the history of targeted advertising, a case could be made that Facebook invented it as we know it today. No diss meant to Google and Googlers that might read this, I’m sure they played a big role as well.
All-sites still have a context in which their ads appear. You are looking at some content on their site, so thy can advertise in the context of that content.
It'd help build a case if they took measurements of noise around the property. I'm not saying it isn't true or anything like it but 'loud noise' can mean a multitude of things. I'd say my downstairs neighbors have jet engines in their house but sometimes it's just a vacuum cleaner and I'm a bit miffed that day. If they'd said that a sound level meter reported +80db at 500m or 1km away, that'd give readers and potential visitors a real measure of the problem and it's consequences.
I'd have a nephew or younger sibling with some take on his hands to make measurements around it and make a graph with the sound levels at various radii and times of day, that'd build you a strong case for the factory being hazardous to health - and hopefully give you ammo for the upcoming legal trouble there'll be over there.
You must have heard it already but you won’t turn into Arnold by doing bodyweight squats 3 days a week for a year. It will, however, shape your body and rearrange fat deposits into more conventionally attractive positions and I don’t think there’s anyone around saying that’s not attractive.
>Are you interested in living in a malthusian nightmare?
Some of them live in such an environment already. I don't know if it's a hallucination or not, but judging from what I've read here over the years a lot of tech people seem to live in the most cutthroat of environments and see everyone as competition to be eliminated or obstacles to be cleared. Some of them live in an environment where you can rely only on yourself, requesting help is seen as weak victim-like behavior, but giving out for free is worse - detrimental because that other person might see what you're doing and take credit for or steal your work; some say helping another with your skills/time and not charging money is peak cuck behavior, and some of the more organized (I'd like to say 'coeficient-driven') members of our community really believe that money is the greatest measurement tool ever invented and we should measure everything with it, including a person's worth.
That being said, generalizing is bad and there really are some truly golden individuals here who have done humanity a net benefit while charging nothing for their work. Like Fabien Sanglard, for example (you likely will never read this but I take my hat off to you and I hope if you get the chance, you should clone yourself in the future - humanity could use at least 10 of you).
I'd find quotes for all of these but I don't think I need them, you've seen these messages if you read the HN comments enough.
Edit: In the 10 or so minutes I took to write my comment, yours went from all black to almost unreadable. It shows better than any treatise would on the opinion HN denizens have on 'free' or 'equal' anything.
I don’t know. It can get pretty dark really quickly and I’m not sure I’d give my kid that kinda game.
If he finds out drug trade, organ harvesting and slave trading are the easiest/most efficient methods of making money, and he will, you might expose him to something a sub-12 year old may not be ready to process yet.
That being said, I love Rimworld and have 1200 hours put into it. It really is the ‘forever game’.
That's fair enough. The health system alone is pretty gruesome, and it's easy to get attached to disposable pawns if you treat them like Sims. A few runs of trying to save "everyone" is soul-crushing enough as-is. Horrible possibilities aside, it just takes a mature mindset to process and respond to every threat or disaster that happens to your colony circumstantially.
That said, I think it's a wonderful system of skill expression that also rewards the opposite style of play. Running a prison pretty much requires the same work as a greenhouse or hotel. Stockpiling drinks and decadent meals can be more lucrative than mass-manufacturing coke. Organ harvesting looks crude and unnecessary once... well who am I kidding, organ harvesting is always lucrative unless you don't get raids.
Perhaps RimWorld isn't for kids. But for teens and adults, it's kinda like a smorgasbord of all the best strategy game concepts rolled into one. And all that being said, the game still isn't offensively explicit or depraved. If you have a specific goal in mind (like the Royalty DLC questline), your run can stay pretty focused without resorting to cannibalism or humanleather parkas. I think the war-crimes reputation of RimWorld turns a lot of people away from the more fulfilling and benign gameplay loops. You can play it like the Sims, if you accept that your neighborhood will be raided by offended tribes and locals. And that your Sims can get carcinoma.
I’m a grown man and I quickly fell into a flowchart mindset when I started, where I checked if a raider: A) Had skills I needed and an appropriate personality, and B) was healthy. That decided if he was scrapped for parts, sold wholesale or recruited. There were counted instances where NPCs didn’t end up in the meat grinder, as viable members of society were few and far between, and they had to be lucky enough to be incapacitated instead of dying in a kill box.
It took a conscious effort not to do this kind of morbid activities. I found late into my Rimworld experience that healing and releasing prisoners nets you good relations with other factions. After releasing 5 or so of them with a full belly and no injuries the tribes and cities around you decide “Hey, you’re alright, mister, we won’t raid you anymore”. Except for pirates, space pirates will never like you. So they either become chicken feed, an involuntary organ donor or a couch, maybe all three.
Time and effort and resources put into helping people that came specifically to kill you doesn’t happen spontaneously and I doubt a kid would favor that style of play. I wouldn’t want my son to tell me stories of how he turns people into a log or how his cyber super soldier can level 100s of tribesmen with a minigun by himself.
I’d rather introduce him to other war crime sims like Factorio where humans aren’t the subject of his ire.
It's just the opposite for me. I think ethics is done right in Rimworld. Doing the right thing should never be the efficient option. I have more issue with the constant violence in there though.
Also I dislike Rimworld becaus it's the forever game. I was happy with the early betas which were winnable, but the recent builds just feel like a treadmill with the game always trying to rip down what you've built up.
Targeting victims of previous scams is common in crypto and MLM circles. The trick is almost always promising them an out of their previous losses with a new venture and this venture is sold to them on the basis of them being ‘experienced’ or ‘knowledgeable’ about the previous venture.