Trump has a lot of wealth on paper, but a lot of it is tied up in real estate, which isn’t the easiest thing to turn into cash when you need it. And a lot is tied up in stock, but since he got caught fixing the books for the Trump Organization, he can’t really use that as his personal piggybank without a lot of scrutiny. And Truth Social is worth over a billion on paper but will crash if he starts to sell any of his stock, which would cause a lot of new problems right now.

Meanwhile, he is burning through money at an insane rate. I mean historically, he’s lost far more money than he’s ever been worth. He’s always had to have new businesses and schemes to cycle through as the old ones crumble. He basically never made a profit until the Apprentice, and that actually caused problems because he’d structured his operations around losing money, leaving other people holding the bag when things go completely south, writing off the loses for tax purposes, and, well, cooking the books.

But with hundreds of millions in judgements against him, on top of the hundred million plus in legal fees, he’s in a bit of a bind. He already had to put a $175 million up for bond to appeal the judgment civil judgment against the Trump Organization. If he loses the appeal, he’s out not just the $175 million, but the full $489 million judgement, plus about $115k a day in interest. Plus he’s got the E Jean Carroll judgments and ongoing cases because he’s a dumb bastard that can’t stop himself from committing defamation every time he leaves a courthouse after losing a defamation case.

While he has been funneling money from his PAC to cover his legal bills that only goes so far, and as I understand it, he can’t use that for actual judgements against him. If he loses the election, he may be fighting legal battles for years to come, that PAC money will likely dry up, and if he doesn’t have the cash when the court demands it, he could see his assets seized and auctioned off. If he wins the election, he can do basically anything and we’re all fucked.

So to simplify this a bit, imagine that he spent almost all his money on a lot of properties without getting a single monopoly, while his opponent has hotels on the dark blue and green properties. He keeps trying to survive the gauntlet and pass go to stay in the game, and maybe he can survive by mortgaging everything, but it’s much easier for him if he has the cash to pay the bill.

First character: A brooding loner with a tragic backstory, full of obvious parallels to my own life.

Second character: Yes these mechanics I’m combining are wildly mismatched, but my backstory explains it all.

Third character: A centaur that I play as a cab driver. Work in references to Taxi Driver, Cash Cab, Fake Taxi, etc. 100% dedication to the bit at all costs.

Fourth character: Mysterious backstory and ominous foreshadowing throughout the campaign, all leading up to the moment in the final session when I unleash the pun that the entire character was built around.

I would like to have an option that works like the instance block feature on connect. It blocks the instance and then puts a “comment hidden due to blocked instance: exampleinstance.net” which lets you know that its there and gives you the option to unhide that comment if you want to know what it says.

How well does it operate during sub-optimal conditions? Electricity can be stored in a battery, so you can spread your power out over time. I would expect some flexibility in this, since heat doesn’t instantly dissipate, but if conditions remain poor for an extended period, I would think this would be much less resilient.

No one’s trying to put terraforming Venus into next year’s budget. This is all theoretical talk about what would be possible to do some day.

The cost of terraforming Venus would be large, but the benefits of having a second habitable planet are also quite large. Even ignoring the benefits of having more land and resources, there’s also the just the fact that being on two planets means we can potentially survive as a species if something happens to one of them.

It would also have to be heavily automated, and only really becomes realistic once you have machines that are essentially self-sufficient at which point the concept of “cost” becomes a lot fuzzier. It would mean dedicating resources, but you aren’t paying an army of self-replicating robots.

However, the sheer scale of the task means that the benefits would only be seen many generations later. It would require extreme efficiency and long term planning with little tolerance for error. The kind of people who would make such an investment are unlikely to just hand the money over to the shadiest billionaire they can find. And it would be difficult to keep a scam going if they need to show continual progress decade after decade.

Maybe we’ll never see enough progress to overcome the kind of greed and short term thinking that would doom a huge, world-altering endeavor like this. But if that’s the case, it’s more likely that we’d just never try. All the more reason to keep pointing out what could be instead of just accepting the shittiness that we see today.

Why not both?

Although Mars is still a terrible candidate for terraforming. It’s at the outer edge of the goldilocks zone, and even if you can solve the temperature, radiation, and atmosphere issues to create a viable ecosystem, it’s still going to cause problems for humans thanks to the low gravity.

Venus on the other hand could realistically function as a second earth if we clean up the atmosphere.

Not in a million fucking years Sony. I would have gladly given you my money, but apparently that’s not good enough for you.

Every time I see Elon’s picture in one of these posts, my brain tells me he’s wearing an Ant Man costume.

In the long term, it’s also possible to alter the atmosphere on Venus until it’s approximately the same as Earth. It would be a massive undertaking, but a hell of a lot easier than getting Mars to a comfortably habitable state. And you could potentially get an entire habitable planet out of the deal, which would be nice.

Kurzgesagt had an interesting video on the topic.

Obviously it would take a significant investment of resources that would benefit some future generation, but not our own. So, back to being impossible, at least for now.

Honestly, she wasn’t putting that much thought into it. She was just parroting a myth that’s been around for a long time, and then trying to defend it when challenged by something that didn’t make sense to her by bringing up something else she doesn’t understand just kind of assuming the answer is in there.

If I was actually going back and redoing the conversation, I would have asked her how many revolutions per minute it takes to keep an object in the air when tied to the tip of a rope (demonstrating if necessary) and then follow up by asking how many revolutions per minute the earth has. The myth she’s spouting is enabled by people not understanding that all that speed they are citing at the equator is only part of the equation, and that they have to divide that number by the size of the earth. Reframing the question in terms of revolutions per minute makes it a lot more intuitive, since a single rpm is obviously very, very slow if you want to keep something aloft, and anyone who knows how clocks work can instantly figure out just how much slower the earth’s spin is.

My aunt once mentioned that if the earth wasn’t rotating that we’d all be crushed by gravity, and it’s only the spinning cancelling out that force. I responded by pointing out that gravity is also present at the poles, where you can casually walk faster than the rotation of the earth, and yet no one has been crushed to death there. She responded that it must be something to do with the magnetic fields, and wouldn’t listen to anything I said when I tried to explain the basic concept of angular velocity.

Or even just the meat that isn’t practical to farm. giraffe meat is apparently sweet and was described by many big game hunters as the best tasting meat they’ve had. No one’s starting up giraffe farms around here, but if you can just get a tissue sample and start mass producing it, we can all have giraffe steaks, rhino burgers, and barbequokka™ at our next cookout.

Could be worse. Wheel of Time has “the one power” which is actually two. And then there’s another one…

The problem with messages 1 and 2 is that too many people will not give a shit about other people, and will also assume they can put a mask on correctly. If your goal is to prevent panic buying and hoarding long enough to build an adequate stockpile for medical workers, you probably want to avoid anything that makes those supplies sound superior and valuable.

If I were crafting such a message, I’d say something like this:

"At this time we aren’t recommending the use of disposable masks by the general public. For now, those who will be wearing a mask should wear one that’s made of tight knit, layered cloth, with a fit that fully encloses the nose and mouth. Cloth masks can be cleaned and reused, and will be easier for most people to wear properly, especially when worn for extended periods of time.

These guidelines reflect our current understanding and will be updated as we learn more."

“Oh it’s baaaaaaad luck to be you…”

I see Hugo has continued to develop his skills.

Normally the ones who buy a console at the end of its lifespan are the ones getting the best deal. You have the entire library of games to choose from, and can get all the best games at once. Plus the system will have dropped in price multiple times since it came out, and the older games will cost a fraction of what they did originally. And of course, they’ll have long since addressed any design problems that early models were plagued with.

At least, that’s how it’s supposed to go.

Hooray, Whale Vomiting Toothpaste beat Windows XP Background and Caricature of a Sad Clown.

Wait, I’ve seen this one before.

I have a similar DNS filter on my router to block ads, particularly on my TV since I can’t put ublock on it. It doesn’t work while on youtube.com, but any video that’s embedded in another site will have ads blocked. So I have a playlist I save videos to from my phone or pc, and my tv has a bookmark for a code testbed that will load the playlist as an embed.

It was still working yesterday, but no idea if that will last.