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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 28th, 2023

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  • The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap is one of my favorite games of all time. It’s the last isometric Zelda game, and they made it a swan song. The main quest it pretty short, but it’s the sort of cozy game where doing the sidequests just feels right.

    In the game, you shrink down to the size of a mouse to traverse rafters and explore tiny temples and float on lillypads. It’s the sort of thing that would be no big deal in a 3D game, but is wildly ambitious in 2D. Not only do they pull it off, but they fill the environments with lush, lived-in detail that springs to life when you shrink down and look at it up close. The art style still sticks with me after 20 years.

    Also, forget all the “hey, listen” stuff, your sidekick Ezlo just sasses you the entire time. It’s great.





  • But we know what it really is all about - selling more cars.

    It isn’t even about selling more cars at this point, it’s about selling securities. Their market cap dwarfs their total sales. Their P/E ratio is 67.67x, meaning they could sell cars for 67 years and still not make as much money as their stocks are worth today.

    The real product is the rising stock price. The factories are just a front.







  • Solid point. A laptop battery is around 60Wh, and charging that in 1 minute would pull 3.6kW from the outlet, or roughly double what a US residential outlet can deliver.

    Supercaps stay pretty cool under high current charging/discharging, but your laptop would have to be the size of a mini fridge.

    The research paper itself was only talking about using the tech for wearable electronics, which tend to be tiny. The article probably made the cars-and-phones connection for SEO. Good tech, bad journalism.




  • Transportation is a necessity, and I believe every inelastic market deserves a nationalized alternative to prevent price gouging. Like how the USPS keeps UPS and FEDEX in line. With that being said, nationalization doesn’t fix this particular problem.

    China is run like a giant capitalist cartel (in all but name), and appropriately, their ultimate weapon in their hunt for global monopolies is the provision of slave labor. The number of slaves in Xinjiang alone is estimated in the hundreds of thousands, and their labor has been credibly linked to the production of cotton (face masks), polysilicon (solar panels), and aluminum and lithium (EVs).

    It’s no coincidence that these are the industries being slapped with tariffs. No amount of subsidization or nationalization can level a playing field that’s been tilted by slavery. You don’t outcompete slavery, you either penalize goods suspected of involving it, or you go full John Brown.



  • Lets drop this whole “lesser of two evils” thing […] it certainly doesnt work with comparing governments.

    I think it is deeply unwise to take that to heart.

    I grew up deep in the American Midwest, surrounded by Evangelical-leaning Christian fundamentalism. Out there, committing one sin was considered as bad as committing a hundred (see also: Matt 5, James 2:10). They dropped the whole “lesser of two evils” thing, and you know what happened? They treated gays the same way they treated murderers, because the two sins were equally easy to condemn. They put rapists in pulpits because in their eyes, molesting a child was just as easy to forgive as ogling an adult.

    When you tell people to reject nuance in ethics, that there is no “greater evil,” you remove 90% of their moral compass. They become pliable and easily manipulated by whoever can seize power or respect (see also: Trump).

    Every person has flaws, and every system, government, or ideology created by people is likewise flawed. If we refuse to judge the severity of those flaws, refuse acknowledge that there are lesser evils in government, then we claim our own ideologies are no better than fascism – after all, both have their sins, and we just claimed that all sins are equal.


  • Despite the fediverse’s reputation for leaning leftist, I feel like such a stranger with how often I find myself arguing that the collective action and solidarity of the working class can and has improved the material outcomes of nations, with or without the capital of the owner class, and with or without the approval of the government.

    Fight in whatever way makes sense to you. Some people will carpool or use less hot water. Some will put peer pressure on wealthy acquaintances. Some will alter design requirements or RFQs. Some will [redacted] a pipeline. It all works towards the same end.

    Yes, this is the fault of the owner class, but who do you think is going to force them to change if we all sit on our hands and say, “I dunno, man, that sounds like someone else’s responsibility.”



  • Also nihilism is fucking [redacted], I’m not sure why you are attributing that to me.

    To recap:

    There’s nothing I can do unless I want to become a hunter gatherer. […] there’s no way around doing infinitely more harm by living […] morally it’s a drop in an ocean of wrong. […] it’s not a moral question, same with the other stuff

    If you had just said that you don’t bother boycotting because your effort is currently being spent in more productive activities, then I would’ve given an upvote and left. But that’s not exactly what you said. You said that any attempt at improving society through personal morality (short of removing yourself from it) is pointless due to the scale of the harm society inflicts. Even if you didn’t mean it, that’s what you stated, so that’s the point I’ve been disagreeing with over here.

    The stance that personal morality should have no place in the shaping of society (and that the common man’s fight to improve society is irrelevant and naive due to the scale of the ultimate victory of the strong over the weak) is a paraphrasing of Nietzsche’s disavowal of “slave morality.” The stance that a person should only advocate for things that help them personally is a paraphrasing of Nietzsche’s ideal of “master morality.” If you don’t want people associating you with that philosophy, you should be careful not to repeat it.