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CHF699.– was CHF849.–
Lenovo ThinkCentre neo 50q Gen 5
1000 GB, 32 GB, Intel Core 7 240H
My addictive pastime
5.5.2020
Translation: machine translated
Is boredom getting the better of you too? I'll tell you what you can do if you're not in the mood for mental, let alone physical, activities.
Haven't I done that before ...? There was this one thing. What's it called again? Oh gosh, it's on the tip of my tongue. Oh yes, I've got it: Universal Paperclips! The best clicker game on earth.
Your paperclip SME
After a while, you realise that you have a lot of unsold paper clips in stock and can't get rid of them. So you lower your sales price, making you cheaper than the competition. Ergo: People buy from you. But people still don't know you well enough, so you need to invest heavily in your marketing.
You gradually buy more and more AutoClippers or soon MegaClippers and optimise their reliability, which increases your production rate. You also get to grips with wire waste, which generates more staples per spool. Business is booming. Your SME slowly develops into an international company and becomes bigger and more successful.
Since your entire business is now running autonomously, you can concentrate fully on your profit. New and larger facilities are needed and better Marketing leads to more gravel. You invest this money in the stock market to become even richer. You eliminate the competition one by one until you finally have a worldwide monopoly on paper clips. Everyone buys from you. You've made it. You've reached the top. And now?
Release the HypnoDrones
The whole world is buying their staples from you, but demand is covered and your growth is stagnating. So you have to get people to buy more paper clips than they actually need. To break the will of mankind and steer it in your favour, you have just the right tool: the HypnoDrones.
By releasing the HypnoDrones, you have completed the first of three levels in Universal Paperclips. But the hard part is yet to come. I don't want to spoil too much, but I will tell you one thing: at the end of the second stage, you will have used up all the world's resources for paperclips, thereby wiping out humanity. In the third stage, you leave our planet and start plundering the universe. Because your goal is still the same: to produce paper clips.
The game asks you at the end if you want to start again from the beginning. Which I have done several times. I can now do it in just under four hours. The more you devote yourself to the game, the more you realise about its mechanisms. Because not every decision is the right one. Some slow you down, others even cause your endeavour to fail.
Now it's your turn. Try your luck at: decisionproblem.com/paperclips