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Troy

@ troyunrau @lemmy.ca

Posts
19
Comments
401
Joined
3 yr. ago

Centrist, progressive, radical optimist. Geophysicist, R&D, Planetary Scientist and general nerd in Winnipeg, Canada.

troyunrau.ca (personal)

lithogen.ca (business)

  • My mom recently rescued four kittens. They are DISGUSTINGLY cute.

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  • Try giving them catnip

  • At your current rate of spending, for how long could you survive without income?

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

  • At your current rate of spending, for how long could you survive without income?

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  • 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.

  • Rate My Cake

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  • That low eh

  • What are your favorite and least favorite pure chance and pure strategy games? And why?

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  • 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.

  • You know that origami flower shop we kept talking about maybe one day wandering through?

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  • 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.

  • Star student

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

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  • 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.

  • Star student

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

    Meow.

  • Let him out 😢

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  • Moths are nudists. Checkmate atheists

  • Can I get one for Astarion?

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  • The idea that light has a binary property of holy versus unholy is pretty funny. You could probably exploit this to do computing.

  • Philosophers Interpret Sisyphus

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  • Right. I'm messaging three of them now. Apparently they want my credit card

  • Philosophers Interpret Sisyphus

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  • Source?

  • Let him out 😢

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  • Non-animal fabrics don't have this issue.

  • I accept I'm the mothman

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  • You'd be served dog, probably. This breed is called papillon because its ears look like butterflies.

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  • We agree entirely.

    Without the ability to exert control and therefore reinforce the definition, borders are as arbitrary as any other law. They are created by people, enforced by people, and if we change our mind then they can go away. It's not some intrinsic property of the planet.

    While I'm ranting, the definition of a relic or artifact is equally arbitrary. As well as the definition of a people. And ownership. At any point in history, these definitions will be different. Right now we've defined it in such a way that we've decided that it is socially acceptable to return relics to people who live inside geographic areas where the relics originated from. This is also arbitrary.

    But as long as people, decide to exert force to reinforce this definitions, there is true as any other law.

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  • When I was in grad school, the philosophy of science students would egg me on with things like: "I'll buy you a beer if you can prove the electron is real". I'd like to think I'm carrying on their tradition in science memes.

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  • One time, I was in the arctic doing some research. On a snowmobile, in winter, we crest a hill and see a couple of wolves pigging out on a caribou. I'm riding in the toboggan, and I start telling at the driver: "go go go!" They proceeded to chase our snowmobile for like a mile, with no hope at all of catching us, but running anyway. Like dogs chasing tires, I think they had no choice. Instincts are strong.

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  • Countries and borders are an arbitrary concept created during the peace treaty of Westphalia.

    Those relics belong to dead people.