We had to wager our houses to get the initial loans during startup. Loans are almost finished.

If I’m frugal, about a year. But I own a small business and this would only occur if my business is bankrupt. In which case debtors might chase my personal assets.

I actually locked the D&D community on lemmy.ca that I created once the ttrpg.network D&D community took off. I recommend that one. I could reactive the lemmy.ca if someone went sideways with that instance.

I also recommend the lemmyverse.net website for finding communities to subscribe to. Copy and paste the community name – should look something like [email protected] – into the search box and then subscribe.

Also, try to subscribe to communities that aren’t on lemmy.world, even if one exists on lemmy.world. Let’s avoid putting all of our eggs in one basket ;)

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 😅

Request for info to be added to fundraising page: which fundraising payment options are processed by American companies. If they’re taking fees, I’d like those fees to go to Canadian firms.

Fuck it, sending an e-transfer. ;)

E: sent $100. The equivalent of two one-year reddit subscriptions. I cancelled my subscription to move over here. Good luck with the fundraising :)

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.

$6k is nothing. Bank it in case of a catastrophic server failure or something.

Nope, haha. OpenSuse is old.

This is an amazing graph. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Linux_Distribution_Timeline.svg

OpenSuse comes from Suse which comes from Jurix and Slackware. There’s a dotted line from Redhat, because of the use of the RPM format, but that is as far as their interbred. Many people consider it one of the OG distros.

Arch sprang from the aether later, but one could argue it owes Gentoo for its concept (also a dotted line there).

Debian is an OG. It, Redhat, and Suse are approximately the same age.

Slackware on the other hand just keeps going.

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 delusional cat owner believes their cats are smart. The honest cat owner believes their cats are just fucking with them. ;)

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.

Cat trained to moew at questioning inflection at end of sentence?

Meow.

Someone sold them a bridge, it seems.

The hydrogen economy will never exist in a profitable or stable way provided most hydrogen is sourced from natural gas wells. It’s a “value add” for existing producers, and a way to say they can’t shut off the wells.

Hydrogen created by electrolysis of water is not energy efficient.

And every one of those are as grounded in reality as sci fi’s agelong obsession telepaths, telekinesis, or mutants with powers.

There is a class of modern sci fi authors are all coming to terms with this.

I’d recommend checking out stories like Neptune’s Brood – sci fi which takes on interstellar economics in slower than light scenarios.

Exactly

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 ;)

Seems entirely reasonable that a Gattaca future is achievable. Whether desirable is the other question. Somewhere CJ Cherryh is being worshipped as a prophet.

Not FTL though. Slower than light, causality preserving version? Sure.

Also, nice to see all those additional names in the commit log. A growing list of contributors is great!

Awesome. Didn’t even notice downtime :)