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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Also has to do with most of their competitors trying to come in immediately with anti-consumer practices or being a company already known for them.

    Like as soon as I saw epic was paying game companies for exclusive access, I decided to skip whatever games actually went for it.

    I don’t trust a publically traded company to not enshitify by focusing on “more money” rather than setting up a sustainable business.

    That’s why I don’t have issues with valve, even if their 30% cut is a bit high. Steam has been dominating its market for like 20 years now and the worst they’ve done that I know of is display some ads for games when you start up. But even that IMO could be used as an example of how to do ads right because a) they are relevant to the thing you’re doing, b) don’t rely on sharing of data between steam and who knows who else (not that I have any certainty there isn’t any data sharing going on), c) the window can just be closed and doesn’t try to fight for your attention. And I can’t even recall seeing it much recently.

    Plus I’d say that they provide value by dominating that space and being the standard that any new players need to compete with.


  • And even if the question isn’t being asked in good faith, just dismissing it might feel like you’re showing them up, but someone who would be convinced by the bad faith question isn’t going to change their mind when they see a “just Google it, it’s so simple”.

    And even for those that do search it, who knows what sources they end up looking at. “Oh, 9/10 oil execs say it’s actually ok while the 1/10 remaining just laugh when asked, so it must be ok! Oh and Fox News confirms it!” Buys another unnecessarily large truck.




  • It’s all gravity in the end. Or probably middle but I don’t know why gravity, so that’s as far as I can reduce it.

    Everything we see around us is just hydrogen trying to get closer to the middle of the biggest hydrogen party it can find in the general vicinity. And we were all once part of at least one massive party that eventually got a bit out of hand when we all tried to get so close together we bounced off of a neutron star before it collapsed into a black hole.




  • You need to explain that, though they are generally rich, it’s not unusual for unheard of princes to occasionally fall on hard times and have their fortunes compensated until they are able to pay a ransom to get a corrupt bank or government to release their vast wealth back to them AND that they are almost always grateful to anyone who assists them in paying that ransom.

    Oh wait, sorry, wrong scam.

    Wouldn’t you find it useful to be able to prove that you paid for something? When you buy an NFT, you’re buying just that: the ability to prove that you bought it. And sometimes it even comes with a copy of an image or a spaceship you might just be able to use in a video game or just hold on to until we develop the technology to live in video game spaceships and you sell it for massive profits!




  • WWI complicated things, eg Ukraine was given up as part of the deal to get the Leninists out of the war. WWII probably didn’t help, at least in some ways. It did help with unity but a lot of Soviets died, either directly in combat or as part of the Nazi purge (Slavs/Russians weren’t seen as much better than Jews by the Nazis).

    There were several factions in a civil war (Leninists, other communists, anarchists, capitalists) and all the alliances and betrayals that goes along with that. Plus outside capitalists didn’t want to see socialism or communism succeed and played interference, though I don’t think that ramped up that much until after WWII, where wars were fought to stop the spread.

    Stalin had a bias for “communist-like” scientific theories, and there was one about how to grow food that came up just as a lot of farm land was being reallocated from long time landowners to people who didn’t have much experience farming. These theories weren’t very successful but those involved had a personal vestment in making others think it was working rather than failing (because gulag vs living nicely). So reports said there was tons of food being produced while there wasn’t, leading to famine, which makes it harder to bring up a brand new economy.

    China also fell for those false reports and adopted the fake science themselves, which contributed to their own famine.

    I don’t recall a lot of the details of that fake science, but a couple of the ideas I do remember: fit as many seeds/plants as possible into any given area because the plants will work together to strengthen their comrades. If you store seeds in the cold, it will make them more cold resistant, allowing crops that wouldn’t normally grow in some areas to thrive there.

    Just those two things plus the land redistribution resulted in people who didn’t know how to farm trying to grow more crops than the land would support, sometimes picking a crop that wouldn’t even grow in that area over less desirable ones that would.

    And of course it didn’t help that the Kremlin still feasted while (false) reports said there were tons of crops being produced, which were also taxed as if the production numbers were valid, so those farmers were also starving, which killed the public support momentum and they had to deal with Stalin’s brutality on top of that.









  • Yeah, but how was that food?

    I just tried a fine dining restaurant for the first time this past weekend.

    I was just curious after watching a bunch of cooking competitions on Netflix about how good that kind of food could be so decided to find a Michelin star restaurant and give it a try.

    While the portions were small, the food was on another level. Even the “worst” of it was only that because it wasn’t amazing, but still really good.

    The food was so good that when I got home and snacked that night, it was hard to enjoy any of my usual favorite snacks because it all felt so basic after that.

    It was fancy in other regards, too. Like when my buddy went to the bathroom, someone came over and folded his cloth napkin rather than leave it bunched up on the table.

    Plus, even though the portions were tiny and we joked about whether we’d need to stop for fast-food afterwards, by the end of the 9 or so courses, I felt completely satisfied. Even the snacking I mentioned was more due to the munchies than actual hunger.

    It was expensive though. Two taster menu plus two drinks each came to about 500 CAD plus tip. And it was one of the cheaper options. There was a two Michelin star sushi place that advertised seats starting at 800 and I’m not even sure that includes any food, though I think it gets the “chef cooks what he wants” menu, which tbf would probably be way better than what I’d want anyways.

    This place only needed to be booked like a month in advance, so the place you’re talking about sounds like it’s on another level itself. Though I’m curious how much that other level translates to better food.