How many times in U.S. History have the 3rd or 4th options been elected to the office of President? When the answer is zero, how do you count them as options?

You are literally more likely to win the lottery than you are to elect a third party to U.S. President.

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plausible: check

testable: TBD

falsifiable: TBD

still, 1 out of 3. not bad!

prices will be raised regardless. record profits? raise prices. record growth? raise prices. cost of production goes down? raise prices.

if you won’t deny a thing to someone it’s pretty hard to sell it to anyone

This is such a common phenomenon that it has a name: cognitive dissonance. If you already knew what that was, then your comment suggests another example of it.

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that’s not the point. the point is that there are people who can’t afford to save money in the long run. not like metaphorically can’t afford, like literally mathematically cannot afford.

they are trapped by their existing financial burdens which they already cannot meet and which are getting larger every month thanks to compound interest.

inflation, which normally has the effect of reducing the value of debts over time, is instead making their financial burdens effectively larger too. as inflation drives up the cost of living, wages stay the same and they have ever less of their income available to make debt payments as a result.

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Hey, I’m fully on board with your defense of social media, but I think in this case the commenter is just saying “i miss the social media we had before they started calling it ‘social media’”. Even 2004 facebook fits this description, and I’m inclined to agree. I miss social media when it felt more like IRC and craigslist, when facebook was a glorified personal guestbook, etc.

A Greek proverb says a society grows when old men plant trees whose shade they shall never know. What’s the exact opposite of that?

Well what’s happening right now is old men are actively uprooting anything that won’t grow to shade tree size in their lifetimes. It’s as if their aim is to one day build their own coffin out of the absolute last tree on Earth.

if you ever feel so inclined, all you need to make your own tortillas at home is:

1. masa flour aka specially treated corn flour

2. a stovetop and a pan for cooking

3. a plastic food storage bag

4. something with a flat bottom, ideally transparent

5. water

the bag of flour typically has instructions for how much flour and water to mix. you can mix it by hand and form it into balls by hand. the size of the balls only matters if you care about the tortillas being “the right size”.

From there, you press a ball flat, toss it on an already hot pan over medium heat, flip it after a couple of minutes, and remove it after a minute more. to press the ball flat, place it under your flat-bottomed transparent thing and mash on it until it looks tortilla-shaped enough for you.

the plastic food storage bag is optional/recommended to stop the tortilla balls sticking when you press them. cut the food storage bag open along its seams and remove its zipper if it has one. what you have left is a single sheet of plastic with a seam/hinge in the middle.

it might be sounding like a lot but it’s really just:

• mix flour into wet balls

• mash flour in your “press” made of random flat dishes and a plastic bag

• cook the thing a little

• eat

if you iterate on those 4 steps a dozen times, you’ll be out like 50 cents of flour and you’ll have produced at least one satisfactory tortilla. and it’ll be so, so much better than store bought, you’ll think about it every time you have store bought tortillas therafter.

fwiw, chemical energy batteries (aka typical batteries) are also potential energy batteries.

I don’t know a simple or correct label that differentiates batteries whose potential energy is gravity-dependent from batteries whose potential energy is chemical-reaction-dependent, but the concept of gravity-based energy storage absolutely is cool as heck.

vote for people that will help build the middle class up again

The point of the middle class is to split the working class in terms of income and wealth, so they spend their time antagonizing each other and mostly ignoring how the upper class is stealing everything.

We don’t need a middle class; we need a strong working class.

You want a class that’s got more education? Educate the working class. You want a class that’s got more wealth? Enrich the working class. You want a class that’s got the time and inclination to make informed political decisions? Deliver workday/workweek reform for the working class.

For one, it’s not an either-or thing. Reporting on lead in chocolate isn’t detracting from awareness of lead in water.

Sure, but you can just not eat Hershey bars.

And second: that. There’s lead in this chocolate? Okay I won’t eat this chocolate. Lead intake reduced.

So tl;dr he/his team did two things:

1. argue the way AI uses content to train is legal
2. provide artists a tool to prevent their content being used to train AI without their permission

On the surface it sounds all good, but I can’t help but notice a future conflict of interest for Zhao should Glaze ever become monetized. If it were to be ruled illegal to train AI on content without permission, tools like Glaze would be essentially anti-theft devices, but while it remains legal to train AI this way, tools like Glaze stand to perhaps become necessary for artists to maintain the pre-AI status quo w/r/t how their work can be used and monetized.

Want is not the right word there, and it completely changes the message.

Or perhaps it’s the right word, because it completely changes the message in precisely the way they intend.

this is a grievance i’ve needed validated for a long time. tysm

it’s such a wild example of feature creep, and yet it’s not quite the wildest example of Star Citizen’s feature creep. When Roberts’ funding exceeded his wildest dreams, he should’ve changed nothing from his original pitch and simply delivered that. For reference:

Original funding goal: $2 million US

Funding by end of Kickstarter campaign: well over $6 million US

If they finished the project with a $4 million surplus, great! They’d have ample budget for post-launch support, and maybe even for some free post-launch content updates to improve goodwill. If that’d gone as planned, the dude’d be sitting on a whole new generation of goodwill.

Oh, and we’d have a game like this:

Pick up jobs as a smuggler, pirate, merchant, bounty hunter, or enlist as a pilot, protecting the borders from outside threats.

A huge universe to explore, trade and adventure in

Wing Commander style single player mode, playable OFFLINE if you want

Actions of the players impact the universe and become part of its history and lore

Fully dynamic economy driven by player actions

If caught alone in an online ambush, send a distress broadcast to your friends and if they’re nearby they can jump in-system to save your bacon.

You wanted proper Newtonian mechanics. You got it! Spaceships adjust their trajectory and orientation just like the real thing.

10X the detail of current AAA games (as measured in polygons)

Range of scale never seen before in a game - ships from 27m to 1km scale, all at same level of detail

Support for Joystick, Gamepad, Mouse, Keyboard, as well as HOTAS, flight chair, rudder petals, and VR

the cardinal rule regarding “in-game purchases” is: Players who spend money purchasing in-game credits will have no advantage over players who spend time!

Instead they immediately pivoted to a pay-for-ships funding model and let the scope grow to seemingly every one of Roberts’ wildest whims

The tech demo is cool. Realization of no-loading-screen transitions from surface -> atmosphere -> orbit -> microgravity -> docking with another ship is wild. Being able to watch your pilot and gunner do a space battle from out the window, while you go walking about the ship is wild. But having it be only a tech demo for this long is so disappointing, and having the focus pivot from singleplayer-with-online to online-with-singleplayer are significant disappointments.

funding timeline: https://starcitizen.fandom.com/wiki/Crowdfunding_campaign

original pitch/campaign: https://web.archive.org/web/20121015042706/http://robertsspaceindustries.com/star-citizen/

corporations can’t seem to ever accept a limit for themselves.

This is the result of competition. When success is measured relative to others, it’s forever a moving target. Under this definition of success, self improvement is equally effective as sabotaging another. And as we can see, it’s not just businesses sabotaging one another. If a business can get away with sabotaging its own consumers, as it can in the case of a monopoly, a cartel, or regulatory capture, it will.