Spelljammer campaign at level 11. We were hired to get a MacGuffin necklace off of a pirate, by his rival. We waltz into his stronghold, get an audience, and then Nat 20 a Persuasion check to convince him for a 1on1 with my bard, b/c for a pirate so tough, what threat could my bard pose? His guards and my party members leave the room.

Land a Suggestion to have him hand me the necklace, and then land a Modify Memory to have him think it was his idea: we would claim he was dead, use the necklace to get an audience with his rival to show her “proof,” and then double cross her and kill her. Then he’d swoop in, reclaim the necklace, and pay us handsomely.

Poor dummy. Hoodwinked!

Only the wrapper containing the Android UI is addressed by the fork

Discontinuation of Syncthing will cause stagnation in the fork as well, unless the fork’s devs announce(d?) they are picking up more work

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion

The fusion of light elements up to a certain nucleus size releases energy. However, fusion only occurs at very high temperatures and pressures. The goal is to 1) create the conditions for nuclear fusion (which they did), 2) have the fusion reaction produce energy that sustains those conditions (they did for 48 seconds), and ideally a tiny bit more, 3) gather residual energy that isn’t critical to the reaction itself, which is the part that looks like a steam engine.

Something about English wants me to say it should be “Battle of the Santas Clause,” but not knowing any of the rules, I couldn’t tell you why.

Give https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html a read. Might sway you, might not.

If dropping a database scares you, you are either unaware of the disaster recovery process, or there isn’t one. Edumacate yourself, or the org, as appropriate, so as to increase your confidence when dropping databases.

Post office too. Really any government office where the public is allowed inside.

Underpaid workers trying to explain bureaucratic minutiae (for which they are not responsible) every single day to people who are not versed in that minutiae, do not want to learn it, cannot learn it, and are preemptively frustrated that they have to have this interaction in the first place. There is no winning–mental health isn’t cheap, do the workers’ resilience only lasts for so many years/months/days before they default to hating the clients, and the clients don’t trust publicly available instructions, thus dooming themselves to the shitty interactions.

The only way to fix this is to take both people out of the equation–preprocess everything that might need to happen for everyone, to the point of turning every transaction into a single trasaction. That requires for every city, county, state, national, international agency to federate, so that you never have to file multiple documents to do a thing.

Capitalism has been touted as superior to the alternatives (Socialism, Communism, etc) b/c it has been claimed to be “self-regulating” and “self-correcting” and “even if we don’t understand why, it fixes itself”–basically the only choice among bad ones that, given our collective small brains, has any chance of sustaining itself and society in the absence of an ability of individuals or government to do so intentionally.

What it really is is an opportunity to stay anonymous while gaming the system, all the while convincing everyone else that they too can game the system (thereby being gamed). It is not a net benefit to society when taken to extremes.

Capitalism is great for the consumer in the micro. If there is a coffee shop on your street that sucks, and you start a coffee shop two blocks away to compete with it with your better coffee, you are participating in the version of capitalism that “works as intended.”

It doesn’t work in the macro. When, instead of continuing to manage your mom & pop business that barely breaks even, you vertically integrate, buy up or otherwise destroy your competition, and then reduce the quality of your product to bare minimums in favor of profits and shareholder value and growth, you take capitalism to an extreme that makes everyone else (the consumers, the workers, the would-be-competitors) have a worse quality of life.

People prefer better quality of life. Capitalism in the modern age is so far in that macro extreme that it no longer makes people’s lives better. East Palestine train derailment as an example… why would they prioritize safety over cost cutting? Bam, a town is cancerous. It’s not unreasonable for people to point at a corruptible system and blame it for the corruption that exists.

Problem is, people are corruptible, so whatever alternative we think is better, someone will come along and ruin it for personal gain.