Centrist, progressive, radical optimist. Geophysicist, R&D, Planetary Scientist and general nerd in Winnipeg, Canada.

troyunrau.ca (personal)

lithogen.ca (business)

  • 48 Posts
  • 745 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Before the enshittification took root, reddit was where I interacted the most with people online. You could buy a subscription to get an ad-free experience. It came with a bunch of Reddit gold you could hand out. Basically, help pay for server time, and get an ad-free experience without adblocking.

    The amount of time I spent on Reddit I would compare to a Netflix subscription or similar.

    In the ramp up to their IPO when they started to fuck with everything, my goodwill evaporated. I stopped moderating and abandoned my subs. Whenever I had new content I wanted to post, I instead post to the fediverse. So, there ya go 😅



  • Right.

    A lobbyist with access to federal politicians in Canada with actual portfolios is like a quarter million per year as a minimum. Maybe a million if you want to fund a “think tank” and publish “studies” and do press releases trying to get the news to bite on some of them, so you can use the news as your excuse to bring issues up.

    If you’re doing it yourself, then $5k might get you a plate at a gala where you hope to run into the appropriate politician for a minute. Would you pay $5k to hope to have a one minute conversation where 45 seconds of it is pleasantries and you might get one sentence in? And you have to use that sentence to explain who you represent… And someone is tugging their elbow leading to another table and they’re gone. Well, hopefully the people at your table were interesting conversation.

    Storytime: I am small business owner. We pay a few thousand dollars a year to throw industry drinking events primarily for networking. Personal invites. Sometimes I can get the provinical Minister of Mines to attend with his handlers, but only if I promise no lobbying. I might get about five minutes of their time (as host) and try to honour my commitment to no lobbying at the event (their handlers will remove them if they feel it is a lobbying event). My payoff is a direct communication line, which I try not to abuse. Then the government changes (elections or cabinet shuffle) and I have to do it again. I’ve failed to get a direct line on the current minister for almost two years. But this is small potatoes Canadian provincial politics. I’d have to spend 10x that amount to attempt get face time with the federal minister.





  • Strategy favourite: EU4, before mission trees were added (too railroaded now). Yes computer game. It’s asymmetric, meaning you can choose to start in stronger or weaker positions.

    Honourable mention: Go, chess, or other games with one page rules and emergent complexity.

    Strategy bleh: any of the modern points based board games that take longer to read the manual than play the game. Catan is the only one I tolerate here, as it has enough people that know the rules that you don’t need to reread it for everyone’s benefit every time. If the game needs a GM to handle the rules, you cannot know enough about the rules to form a strategy while only playing it rarely.

    Chance: Cribbage, in two player version. Well, admittedly you can still outplay the other player. But to outplay them, you need a fast and intuitive grasp of statistics. Selecting the cards for the crib is the biggest strategic advantage here, and it’s more of a weighted odds thing.

    Chance bleh: Blackjack. You have no way to affect the outcome. There is a right way to play (over a large enough number of hands), and that is it.

    Hybrid: soft spot for Texas Hold 'em. It’s a good hybrid of chance, strategy, and straight up social skills. No other game seems to rely as much on reading people, and you can do this right or wrong in dramatic fashion.

    Lastly: D&D is the best of everything. The rules are long, but the DM looks after details (or you can wing it and no is grabbing the book to check). It has the reach of Catan, meaning you aren’t learning new rules at every table. There are social elements, chance elements, tactical elements.



  • The government has a monopoly on force. That force should be weilded by the fairest and most impartial people possible. Police, investigation agencies, etc., should be as free from bias as possible.

    Now, you have multiple ways to get to that point, and people have different opinions on the purest way to achieve this. But, electing them doesn’t seem to be the way. Tyranny of the majority is too strong. And appointment by elected officials is equally problematic. So how then does a system establish that is not subject to abuse by those with power?

    I would argue that the best system for appointing law enforcement seems to be via a benevolent dictator or monarch or their representatives. And it only works for their lifetime, unless the inertia of the benevolent institution can be sustained. Well, it’s a crapshoot but stable at least for the lifetime of the monarch or similar.

    I’d also entertain citizen lotteries for these sorts of positions. But that’s a crapshoot on shorter timeframes.






  • Exceeding FTL (and breaking causality) is basically a sci fi trope at this point with about as much credibility as psychics. To have at least some credibility you need one of: a testable hypothesis, or an unexplained phenomenon. Right now we have neither. At best, we have some equations, that work below light speed, where we can extrapolate past light speed and see how the math works. The problem is: none of these equations are testable as they all contain infinities or other asymptotic features that prevent passing light speed itself. So, if there’s no viable math to get from sublight to FTL, and there’s no unexplained phenomena, then what we’re left with is nothing.

    Even quantum entanglement, which is a darling of sci fi whenever they need a plot device (hello Le Guin and the ansible), has categorically been shown to obey causality and the light speed limit in every lab test.

    At some point it’s like asking for negative mass, antigravity, or other things that the math would allow. Except our universe doesn’t.

    I’ve got a wormhole to sell you ;)