And this would be gotten when you use your HP to curate, right?

No, this is inconditional. You don't need to do anything. It rewards the mere fact that you turned your Hive (liquid, transferrable) into Hive Power (like a term deposit - not liquid, you can't sell it unless you turn it back to liquid Hive which takes 3 months).

If you use your HP to curate yourself that qualifies as work - you have to spend time, read articles, select those you want to upvote. That is better rewarded than not doing anything.

And you don't even have to lift a finger which what passive income is supposed to be.

Exactly! If you have HP you can

1. be happy with the 2,95% from inflation
2. work for more by curating (and producing our own content too)
3. or delegate your HP and let others do the work ! like a true capitalist pig ! :) That is what I am talking about here. You pick an allocation, assign delegations and lay back and watch the liquid Hive flowing back to your account at an average of 8%. It's not huge but you also have the upside of Hive appreciating wrt fiat currencies, which is what people usually buy crypto for.