If there is somebody willing to pay more for what is ultimately a limited supply of potatoes, why not sell to them. If the price per ounce of chips is too high for you, you’ll buy less chips. People who just can’t live without those chips might buy less candy to make sure they can afford them.

All the while people who make chips are asking for raises because the chip market is hot and the boss just can’t get enough people into the plant to make them. The workers know their boss needs them badly so they are comfortable asking for more. The boss relents because he needs them in there making those chips or he’s gonna lose money with potatoes rotting in the warehouse.

Sellers raise their prices because they have buyers ready to pay that higher price.

Say your have the best restaurant in town and you have a line down the street and everyday you sell out of food before lunch. If you raise your prices the line will get shorter as some of your more price sensitive customers decide to go elsewhere. Keep raising them and your shop will be empty as nobody wants your food at those prices. The “right price” is where you get the most money you can for the work that you do in a day. Right?

You should be looking at your wages exactly the same. Ask for 10k per hour and you’re going to be jobless. As for 5 per hour and you’re gonna have lots of offers but not make enough money. Try to find the “right” wage. This is why wages have been going up faster than inflation pretty much every quarter since some time in 2022.

And no, we shouldn’t punish you or our hypothetical restaurant owner for setting your prices properly.

Also, taxes don’t remove money from the economy so it would be neutral from an inflation standpoint. But that’s a much longer story.

This comes from a memory of a digression during a lecture in an ecology class I was in 20yrs ago… so you know, grain of salt.

From this particular professors point of view. Symbiotic was the term to describe mutualism until recently. And then. A few papers started using symbiosis as an umbrella term for all relationships with sub-terms to describe the “benefits math”. This, to him, was annoying pedantry. But eventually all the textbooks adopted the new hierarchy of terms and the world moved on.

If you took a biology class with a text published pre-2000s, it’s very possible that your book described symbiosis as a mutually beneficial relationship between species.

Long story short: the language is fluid and ever changing, even in science fields.

I have to know what the Detroit soccer team did to get so high on that list. Somebody here must know. Please!

Anybody who tries to arrest him will be at war with Israel and probably the US and probably a lot of other nations. They will break their treaty with ICC before they start that war and everyone fucking knows it. Why do we pretend?

No, it means they were ONLY held accountable because they lost the war.

Nobody prosecuted Churchill for Dresden

People’s take on this stuff always seems so naive to me. All war ever can be viewed as an attempt to arrest the leader of another group for “crimes”. When you get arrested… that means you lost the war. Winning a war means you didn’t get arrested.

The ICC is such a silly stupid waste of human attention. It’s like an idea that children came up with after watching Star Trek. It has no utility whatsoever for our species. We fight, we have winners and losers. If you start a fight with somebody stronger than you, you are gonna have a bad time. If you start a fight with someone weaker than you, others will think you are dishonorable. That doesn’t mean you get arrested.

RTS did go mainstream and it indeed turned into games very different from old school SC et al.

Plants vs zombies and LoL are the descendants of the genre and are or at least were, HUGE. Tower defense and moba are the two evolutionary paths that RTS took.

Tower defense is super mainstream, but moba, while huge isn’t really mainstream in my opinion. But one things for sure, they don’t have much in common with SC except the lineage.

It’s the same thing the right does with government. It is a truism that there is all sorts of “inefficiencies” where the money is going to the wrong people for the wrong stuff.

In both cases, it’s sort of correct and sort of wrong. Corporations, governments, and any human institution beyond a certain scale (a few hundred people), will leak wealth into places it shouldn’t. It’s an unavoidable feature of our species as best I can tell.

It’s fine to accept it, it’s fine to be angry about it. It’s silly to blind yourself to it in some places and whinge about it in others.

I have no diagnosed neurodivergence and I’m looking at that list with surprise. Like, you know how fucking hard I’m working to pretend I can do that stuff?

A person who can do all that shit looks like a superhero to me. No talent… fuck… if that list had telekinesis on it’d feel about the same to me.

Oh wow, that sounds like a cool project. I will look into it.

I ended up making an awesome esphome rig for my garage door. An esp32 board, a magnetic switch for position detection and a little relay that closes for .5s connected to the wall button wires.

Super simple and it works crazy well. It also cuts out all the proprietary shit the manufacturer would prefer I use.

Renting a ICE for your road trip is probably a better plan than buy an EV with only that use case in mind. Renting a truck the day you have to haul shit is a better idea than driving a truck everyday.

People need to stop shopping for a vehicle based on the .01% task and focus on how they drive 99.9% of the time.

The never ending growth thing is complex. But set all of that aside, if your company doesn’t peruse the growth, somebody else will. There is no future where nobody bothers to try and sell to a market that is begging for a product.

Nobody needs Microsoft to exist, but people want free software and services (windows is functionally free, the last time I paid for it was win7). They can take a privacy purist route and change $3-400 for a license w/ an update every 5yrs but the product will die and everyone will switch to chromebooks.

Microsoft can “be better”, and then they would stop being relevant. If you want a little better, pay the Apple tax, if you want A LOT better pay the time tax and use Linux.

First the money was in the hardware. Then, the money was in the software. Then, the money was in the services. Now, the money is in the data you can harvest from the users.

If being a sponge for ads, and a source of data to sell and use for training LLMs, is not your thing, using computer systems produced by for profit companies is probably out.

Enshitification isn’t driven by some new and unique greed. It’s the only way left to earn money in the space. Customers WANT subsidized hardware running free software and cloud services. If MS doesn’t give them that somebody else will and that will be that.

I don’t want to blame customers for all this. But to most folks trading something they didn’t know had value (their data and attention) for something that they know has value (software and services) seems like an awesome deal. The corps are following the customers to some extent, and we have to acknowledge that.

I was agreeing with you and being a little sarcastic. Of course you are right, there is nothing genetic about it.

There is very little incentive for native English speakers to learn a second language because English is far and away the most popular second language.

Which I’m sure is a contributing factor to the complete lack of investment in second language education the anglophone world.

It’s such a silly concept. This massive superstructure of division to replace the simple idea that “I have a lot in common with peers in my age cohort”.

As soon as somebody says “technically you are a member of generation___”, you can ignore them. Anyone who puts a generation label at the center of their identity probably doesn’t have a lot else going on.

Amazingly native English speakers the world over seem to have this genetic predisposition! All of us just can’t seem to get it together when it comes to becoming multilingual.

OR… maybe it comes from being born into mastery of the language everyone else on earth is trying to learn. I get three words in Spanish out before my conversation partner asks to switch to English. What am I gonna do? Stamp my feet and demand I get to practice my hobby and deny them the opportunity to work on a valuable career skill. Nah. We’ll speak in English.

Your ancestors (assuming you are British) created a global language hegemony. My ancestors moved from southern Italy to the US and learned their language.

Started playing with arch this week for the first time. Got a pretty good laugh when I realized that I forgot to install a dhcp client and had to boot the install media again to add networking.

I appreciate what they’re doing and I’m going to keep poking at it, but my first impression is that philosophy is driving and the utility is in the back seat.

If the prices are negotiable, imma be in there haggling like I’m at a Turkish bazaar!

Imagine the chaos it would cause in these stores if they had to negotiate every item. If one it ten customers walked away leaving a cart full of groceries in the checkout. Fixed prices are the technology that allows these giant stores to exist. This will never work.