https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/smurf_account

Coined by Geoff Fraizer and Greg Boyko, who played the online multiplayer game Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness under the names Shlonglor and Warp. The pair had become so proficient at the game that few people would play against them, so, in order to avoid scaring off potential competitors, they created alternate accounts named PapaSmurf and Smurfette (characters from the Smurfs comic franchise).[1][2]

So basically the most infamous and potentially first widely known instance of this behavior, well they just picked Smurf character names, presumably for the effect of it being more humiliating to be owned by derpy cartoon characters.

Also, apparently ‘smurfing’ or a ‘smurf account’ also means basically a fake/decoy/money laundering/washing bank account:

2. (law enforcement, banking, slang) A bank account of many intended to handle illicit money in amounts too small to raise suspicion.

As far as I can tell, advertisement/profit-driven social media that is directly tied to your real identity might actually be the worst thing humanity has ever invented.

Oops!

Turns out we’re mostly vain and stupid, in our default state.

Now amplify.

Oh and as a bonus:

It serves as a kind of self perpetuating auto-panopticon.

It never ceases to amaze me how many people just record thems committing, planning to commit, bragging about committing, or admitting to commiting crimes that can put you away for 5 years plus… on fucking TikTok.

Hey wow its like I’ve been saying that for a decade, but because I’m poor and I say that, clearly I am some kind of antisocial insane person, not somebody who can read a bunch of existing studies and data and form a conclusion.

Corporation would never gaslight you!

… unless you deserved it.

“Walled garden initiates universal tollbooth policy overhaul.”

Holy shit that reminds me, I’m so far behind on my Zelda shit that I haven’t even yet played OoT master quest or whatever its called?

But yeah, its… pretty sad, the state of Nintendo these days.

For everything there is a season and a time for every purpose under heaven.

Spock - Civilization 4 (2005)

This is your life, and its iterating one internal clock cycle at a time.

(I recommend not tying too many vital specific timed calls directly to the specific clock speed of your particular hardware)

I can still remember I think some new grounds stick figure type animated comic, made back when it was Macromedia Flash, not Adobe Flash, and it was mocking the idea of 20 years in the future we would have Call of Duty 16.

… I think if you actually count them numerically we are now beyond 20.

… 24 mainline games, apparently.

… and Nintendo still hasn’t figured out how to run it at an actually stable 60 fps.

Heres how that works:

Gaming got popular.

Normies like fancy graphics, production value, and are swayed by fake trailers and mass marketing campaigns.

(Doing all that well, in a way that people can actually afford to pay for, is extremely difficult and very expensive)

Corpos discovered they could turn everything into primarily a market for subscriptions and micro transactions, that houses a game, and most normies kept paying for all that untill the economy entered the Second Great Depression.

… its basically Dutch Disease, but for video gaming.

You know that ‘Cleopatra is temporally further away from the Great Pyramid’ thing?

Grand Theft Auto V’s release date is closer to Half Life 2’s release date, than to the present.

Grand Theft Auto 4’s release date is closer to the release date of the original Starfox or Street Fighter 2, than it is to the present.

And you don’t even want me to do any date comparison for the following:

… Let’s do the time warp Againnn!~

Question for you:

Is there any gold involved in the process of you typing and posting that comment?

Could there maybe be, I dunno, gold, literally as a direct component in, or vital to the manufacturing process of … maybe some kind of computer chip or something?

Yep, you got it.

Gold and silver originally became commonplace as money, as currency, because they are excellent material to make coins out of.

You can carry bits or coins of gold and silver on your person, and you can denominate them fairly easily, you can store them and they won’t corrode, and its not that hard to weigh them or melt them down.

Compare that to trying to haul around a backpack or trailer full of bigmacs.

Yeah, they’re pumped full of preservatives, but they won’t last anywhere near as long as a non reactive metal.

Nowadays… well, gold and silver are massively important components in computer technology.

So they’ve got the historical basis as money, and the commodity basis of having a significant amount of vital industy dependant on them.

Bitcoin people used to argue that bitcoin would be a superior currency to all other currencies for a myriad of reasons… but you will always need some kind of computer thing that is either made out of or at some stage of industrial production involves gold/silver/other metals to even be able to transact with bitcoin.

In a modern, capitalist, international fiat currency context, you also can’t escape some kind of supply/demand based on use case dynamic for currencies.

Oh, your economy is imploding due to a debt/bond/stock/trade balance crisis?

Less ongoing demand for holding your wealth in that economy’s currency, even if it is in bonds that pay interest or stocks that are nominally appreciating.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma

We are currently basically reverting to a pre Breton Woods international monetary system as the USD implodes, central banks everywhere are hoarding and repatriating gold as the de facto international exchange mechanism, as geopolitical monetary turmoil rises.

https://www.macrotrends.net/1437/sp500-to-gold-ratio-chart

So basically, if at the beginning of 2024, you had $100k in the SP500, you would have ~$146k right now.

If you had $100k of gold at the beginning of 2024… you would have ~$275k right now.

Thats 1.46x vs 2.75x.

That’s gold outperforming the SP500 by 88%, in just over two years.

That is a dying economy and currency.

Gold went from about $2000/oz in early 2024 to about $5500/oz at time of me writing this.

I think it was like a week ago that Goldman Sachs or somebody said gold might hit $5400 by the end of the year.

https://www.kitco.com/news/article/2026-01-22/goldman-sachs-raises-2026-gold-price-target-5400oz-private-sector-joins

Yep there it is.

So uh, we did a year in a week.

One of the reasons I no longer work at a non profit group of homeless shelters in the US is because the board fucking contracted consulting with a private security company that worked with and had many IDF people in it, for our shelter security protocols.

That and I was adamantly opposed to using any Microsoft service to handle any of our data on our homless and in need ‘clients’.

I was about 5 years ahead of the curve on ‘MSFT is a data / PII security nightmare’, just look at basically all of Europe right now, but you can perhaps imagine how that attitude doesn’t fly so well in Seattle.

I’m not really trying to critique you, I just know that a ton of people only read the headline or don’t read things thoroughly, or don’t even click into the actual article at all.

I am just adding my 2 cents as someone with a degree in economics, so I’m not citing the article, I’m citing my years of education in economics and years of work that made use of it.

The article does not really go into the difference between US and UK law around monopolies, so I wanted to explore that a bit myself.

Also, when you say ‘the first lines of the linked article says what I said’… do you mean the OP linked article, or the lexology link that I provided?

Because the IGN article says nothing about whether simply being a monopoly is illegal, that’s why I provided the lexology link, to clarify that.

Sorry if I am not quite understanding what you are saying.

This is a great write up to which I can only add that I know that in the ongoing US case, Valve has been arguing that not only is the 30% cut not particularly onerous, and is actually pretty close to the industry norm…

… they also make the argument that Steam provides much, much more to both the consumer and the prospective game seller that…well they just do actually offer many more features and services than existing comparable platforms.

The DLC thing is an interesting idea, but… oh god, basically, is my database manager brain’s response to that.

You’d have to construct like a shared standard of game key liscenses across all digital platforms, you know, the not unlike the kind of thing every single idiot a few years back claimed would be possible with their NFT games.

This is… an interesting idea, but I don’t see how you could actually implement this in practice without basically creating a government agency to manage it.

… Which would then also probably mean that said government would now directly know every game you own.

And then you’d have to think about how that would play with things like game key selling sites…

Yeah. This would be a nightmare to try to actually implement.

Now the government would be directly involved in DRM. Like uh, potentially, verify your actual identity with face scan to log in to your game library of any kinds of games… that kind of involved.

There are many other complexities and problems than that.

To add to what you have said:

Valve is an effective monopoly.

A lot of people seem to think ‘monopoly’ means ‘literally 0 alternatives for the consumer’, but this is not the case in either actual economic jargon/theory nor in basically any legal definition of it I am aware of.

To be a monopoly you basically just need to be the clear dominant actor in some market. Not the only one, just the main one, such that you can make pricing decisions in a way that other actors in the same market can’t, basically.

Its… very rare for a ‘true’ or ‘perfect’ monopoly to ever exist for basically anything other than a public utility/service. It almost never happens.

This is the kind of pedantry that is annoying but unfortunately important, similar to how ‘Impeachment’ by the House on its own is actually pointless beyond a mark of shame unless it is also followed by a ‘conviction’ by the Senate.

You are correct that in US law, a major factor that is considered is whether or not the company did abusive, deceptive, underhanded stuff to achieve its monopopy status.

But UK law appears to be different:

https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=c5b1e681-5fb5-4161-bebf-823034fab751

You could be doing ‘abuse of dominance’ whether or not you achieved that dominance by underhanded means.

So… while I am not a lawyer, I would be genuinely surprised if Valve was found in serious violation of existing US monopoly laws, but I would be less surprised if they were found to be in violation of existing UK monopoly laws.

Kind of pretty important and relevant:

The main reason why this process isn’t “something for nothing” is that it takes twice as much electrical energy to produce energy in the form of gasoline. As Aircela told The Autopian:

Aircela is targeting >50% end to end power efficiency. Since there is about 37kWh of energy in a gallon of gasoline we will require about 75kWh to make it. When we power our machines with standalone, off-grid, photovoltaic panels this will correspond to less than $1.50/gallon in energy cost.

So basically juat imagine a gas powered generator hooked up to this to power the process of pulling gasoline out of the air.

Ok, see how that’s silly?

Right, now, if you do run it off solar power, then sure! That makes more sense.

Hate hyrdocarbon fuels all you want, they are very good at being dense, portable, and exist in the vast majority of pre-existing logistics infrastructure.

But the thing isn’t magic, it takes energy to convert air into basically a form of liquid energy.

And… you’d probably have to refine it or chemically treat it at least somewhat.

I’m not a chemist, but I am guessing this is the case, if you want gasoline that is just equivalent to what your car would expect.

The hipsters balnakanized and fragmented because we were forced to attempt to migrate to find reasonable housing prices and jobs.

Yep, that’s right, blame capitalism.

Wow you have poor reading comprhension.

Just because I didn’t explictly reference the thing that the ironic joke would be referencing doesn’t mean I don’t know the reference.

You just read that what I said, and because I didn’t explictly indicate the reference to the loose vagina meme, well that must mean I am unaware of it.

You’re confusing me being general with me lacking specific knowledge.

Please learn how to read, and leave me alone.