Thursday, June 06, 2013

Ingress: The Squad

Induction happens only in person, at the Squad events.
  • You have to own an External Battery. 
  • You have to be playing Ingress at least 10 hours a week. Staring at the Intel map does not count. This is 10 hours of actively interacting with portals. 
  • You have to personally know someone who is already a member of The Squad. 
  • You may not be a member of any other Resistance/Ingress team. 





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Ingress: Portal Submissions Are The Bomb



If you are like me, you started the game by chasing portals. You walked long blocks. You took the train to portals an hour away. You jumped into a car with someone to go hack portals hours away. That is called chasing portals. And that is fine. You got to go where the portals are.

But you should also make the portals come to you. And you do that by submitting portals. And it is never too early to start. I think you should start making portal submissions as early as Level 1. Do not wait.

Sculptures and churches are a good bet. Close clusters are better than one portal per block. Start building your home territory right away. You want at least 20 portals that you can walk over to any time.

I remember the excitement when my first portal went live. I had submitted it when I was a mere Level 1. I would not have made that particular submission if I knew better. But it went through. I was in a slow phase of the game when, boom, 20 of my portals went live on a single day. And I was back in the game like crazy. Then started a new phase of the game for me: the phase of submitting portals. Why spend most of your time fighting over portals that already are? Why not submit more?

I don't know about you but I get a kick out of creating fields. And you have to be able to own a cluster of portals for at least a few hours for you to be able to create anything meaningful. And so I have not only submitted portals with me and my team in mind, but also for enemy agents nearby who I think are a major nuisance to my field creation attempts! Here's 10 for you, now go buzz off!

In about two months I expect to have all the portals I need in my local area. And my definition of local area is kind of large. It involves at least four different neighborhoods in NYC. I think I am pretty much done submitting portals. Once my local portals go live I will be ready for some team building.

Right now it is my reading of the Ingress intel map and the COMM that the green team in the city has momentum. They pushed the blue team from owning 66% of the city to 50%. I happen to think they will go all the way to owning 66% of the city. They have wind in their sails.

It is a mathematical proposition. 66% is the point where arrogance sets in. But if they play it right they might even be able to take it up to 70%. I have seen new green L8 agent names pop up left and right. But then the pendulum will swing again. Just like portals flip, that's a given, the teams have pendulum swings. As your territory expands, your team members get less and less hungry. The enthusiasm level goes down. Infighting might start. And, boom, next thing you know the other team is steamrolling all over you.

Just when most of my local portals go live is when I expect the pendulum to swing again. And hopefully Niantic will have done at least one more round of allowing each agent a few invites, and there are more agents in the field. I look forward to team building.

Starting to play the game was fun. Hitting L8 was fun. Being able to do L8 farms was fun. Making portal submissions was fun. I think team building will be the most fun.
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Ingress: Portal Building, Field Building, Farm Building, Team Building


You start out by building portals. You deploy resonators, you fill up the slots, and you build portals. Then you go on to build fields. And I still get major kick out of it. The geometry of building fields gets me still. Then you go on to build farms. You can build up to a Level 5 farm on your own. You need two L8 agents to build a L6 farm, three for a L7. And the grand daddy of all are L8 farms: you need 8 Level 8 agents for that. Agents loaded with L8 bursters are just waiting to explode.

And farm building is great fun. L8 farms are probably the best part of hitting L8 as an agent in the game. Many agents go on to build home territories. They lay claim to maybe 20 portals. If you flip them, they will flip it right back.

What's after farm building? I think the answer is team building. There are only two global teams possible. Those who ask for a local count of mind units have not read the Ingress storyline. But there are countless local teams. There's room for as many teams as you might wish to create. One city can hope to have many teams. Just like there is no limit to how many portals you can submit, it is for you to decide if you want to build a team.

I am glad to have reached that stage in the game where I am taking active steps towards building what I hope will be the top Resistance team in New York City. My team really starts taking off when there are at least three times more people playing the game. Ideally my team will thrive best when the game is fully public. Anyone can get Gmail today. Anyone should be able to start playing Ingress. There are about five members of timtomhuze who have taken to expressing hostility to me personally on the local faction chat. They don't like the idea of me building a team. Guess what! It is not like I need your permission. This is not your game I am playing.

Ingress is not a complex game. It should not be turned into a complex game. A L8 agent should not be too much more powerful than a L1 agent. I love Niantic's goal of having a billion people play the game. Email is not just pigeons carrying letters. Ingress is not just Capture The Flag.

This is not a complex game. The only complexity comes from how big a team you can build. Complex farming and attack events are possible when you have a large team. But large is not how many people you manage to get on your G+ group. Large is how many people you can get to show up for your events. Last I checked the two teams in NYC hovered at about a dozen people showing up at any one time. This game is early stages. I look forward to building my team: The Squad.
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Sputnik Moments?

China surpassing U.S. with 54.9 petaflop supercomputer
President Obama made note of China's supercomputing accomplishment in his state of the union speech in January, 2011, where he said the U.S. was facing another "Sputnik moment" in wide range of technologies.
The American political system's strength is that free speech is deeply embedded in the culture. The Chinese political system's strength is that they have what might be called campaign finance reform in American lingo.


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Tuesday, June 04, 2013

Grocery Is Trickier

Amazon plans big expansion of online grocery business: sources
Wal-Mart is testing same-day and next-day delivery of online grocery and general merchandise orders in the San Francisco Bay Area and operates a grocery delivery business in Britain..... FreshDirect delivers food to homes and offices in some parts of New York City and its trying to expand its service into the Bronx. .... If online orders also include higher-margin general merchandise such as digital cameras ..... "Grocery is a frequency business. If Amazon can deliver to consumers' homes two or three times a week, they can up-sell other items" ..... Amazon offers same-day delivery in several cities including New York, Washington D.C. and Chicago, and since last year the company has been building new distribution warehouses on the outskirts of the Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay areas.
Amazon Reportedly Looking To Expand Grocery Business, Roll Out AmazonFresh Beyond Seattle
Amazon has had an ongoing experiment for the past half decade called AmazonFresh, which offers grocery service and delivery of fresh produce to customers in its home base of Seattle. That program is on the verge of a significant expansion .... grocery has proven relatively impervious to attempts to turn it into an online business thus far, mostly because of immense costs of keeping inventory on hand, factors like spoilage that don’t affect other goods, and delivery complications (refrigerated trucks, for instance).
But no telling how adding intelligence does not make it a better experience.
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