Care to elaborate?

Meta question: this topic is about the act of reading, and not about any specific books. Is there a meta “reading” community where this topic would be better suited so as not to disrupt the signal-to-nouse ratio here? Or are we still small enough to keep everything lumped together.

Not meta, but related to the article: started reading a new (to me) sci fi series while on the beach last weekend (Canada Day long weekend). Primaterre. About a third into the first boon. Great escapism, mediocre writing. Will finish the first book and then read some reviews and see if the series is worth investing my time in. But, yeah, it feels good to zone out 😄

Sorry, I’m not American. Looking at it from the outside. There are a lot of things America can do better.

But from a purely math perspective, it’s a good metric to explain why Japan has what it has.

Or healthcare. Or whatever else. Yes.

But you’ve already lost the war against the capital class and are left dreaming.

Japan is smaller than California, with several times the population density.

Reframe your thoughts as: taxpayers per mile of track. Then begin to understand.

Wish you luck 🤞

“Decaf!?”, he screamed incredulously as he plunged the broken carafe into the barkeepers neck.

🦟

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.

Yeah, accuracy is hugely improved. However the POV shots feel like biplane gun footage. Like this stuff: https://youtu.be/dwrIf_5gEEM?t=354

gramie already mostly answered in line with what I’d say: there is an alt-right political shift there, where the lunatics are running the asylum and we keep expecting for sanity to re-emerge. Every country has a pocket like this somewhere. Most people in Calgary are perfectly nice, in the same way that most people in Omaha are perfectly nice, until a trans person is on TV.

As a huge sci fi fan, thanks for the rec. Have never read Forward.

Yeah, I love to say: if you assume unlimited free energy, then… all sorts of cool things suddenly become realistic. But we also probably just boil the planet to a cinder (unlimited energy becomes unlimited waste heat) due to short sighted greed instead. Cause things like Bitcoin make no fucking sense on the scale of civilization, and yet how much energy do we spend on it?

With unlimited energy someone will be like: damn, I could make a fortune harvesting all the atmospheric nitrogen and hoarding it and selling it back to the world so they can be 3% nitrogen by mass. Or some shit.

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.

There are a lot of people who are bad at business.

A $40 paper flower, and a $2000/mo lease. Assuming you are sole proprietor and have zero employees, and need an additional $2000/mo to live a meagre existence (food, apartment, etc.) and it takes you 15 minutes to fold each flower.

Minimum revenue to stay afloat, 800 flowers per month. You’d need to fold for 200 hours, or approximately a 40 hour week of folding. That leaves zero time to do any marketing. So you’re relying entirely on foot traffic, or you’re marketing as overtime.

To reach 800 sales per month with something so trivial, you’d property require a reach of at least 20,000 customer touch points per month, each who has the time to chat about paper flowers, because your conversion rate is going to be shit. If it’s passive reach, you might need to get an ad in front of half a million per month. You’d need to be a tiktok celeb or something to get this reach without adding expensive ads. And that’s a fucking gamble and a half.

There’s no way this model works. And the fact that someone tried it isn’t something to celebrate. They possibly poured their life savings into the drain, went bankrupt, and hopefully concluded they were bad at business.

If you want to sell paper flowers, do it as a side gig from you home. Or make them so luxurious that you can sell them at $1000 each, and rich people buy them as wedding presents – then you only need to sell four per month and can spend the rest of the time marketing.

Sometimes this war feels to WW1

My party artificer, making a sheering kit…

One: gravity pulls you in. You die in a flaming fireball just due to the speed you gain entering the gravity well. Like, your kinetic energy is so high that the impact of you (or your spacecraft) into the atmosphere is a small nuke. Every kilo of your ass blows up as though it is several kilos of TNT.

Well, okay, let’s say you engineer something to brake with - like the largest rocket every conceived (and you brought it with you), or a really clever aerobraking rig. And you enter the upper atmosphere.

Well, it’s just “air”, mostly hydrogen and some helium, but also some smaller amounts of stuff like water, methane, nitrogen, sulphuric acid… Fluffy clouds of stuff. If you have an energy source, you could probably find a way to generate lift and stay alive near one atmosphere of pressure, circling around in the clouds. Avoid the storms, the lightning, and (depending on the gas giant) bring a good heater.

Hard to create a blimp on a gas giant. It works on earth due to the density differences between hydrogen/helium and the air. Guess what the air is made from on a gas giant. So active lift is required. Motors, fans, wings, etc. Hopefully you have a nuclear power source or something cause eventually you’ll run out of energy and drop.

Then, well, you probably drop slowly. Terminal velocity will be a thing, but the atmosphere gets thicker as you go down. You’ll get crushed before anything gets terribly interesting, chemically speaking. You won’t see the diamond rain, or the metallic hydrogen core. Too bad. I hear it’s lovely.

Nice kitties

Aha, “just south of me”, I say from a thousand miles away.

If you’re a mountains person, yeah BC is the place to be. But it’s also same-same as what you can see in a lot of places in the US in the mountains. Like, you won’t tell the difference between much of BC and much of Washington.

If you’ve got the time, go straight north from your location. Way way north. Go to Yellowknife, and do it in March – it’s about three days driving. You’ll get there and they’ll have northern lights galore, ice castles on the lake, people driving their trucks on the ice to their houseboats that have just frozen into the ice for the season…

Or go in summer and go fishing there. The lake is 600m (1900ft) deep… Trout like tuna.

Unsolicited advice ends ;)

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