chonglibloodsport
@chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world
- Comment on Warcraft 1 and 2 Remastered and the long-awaited 2.0 patch update for Warcraft 3: Reforged have just launched on PC for Warcraft's 30th anniversary 1 day ago:
Yeah that’s how the Total War series does it. A single unit could be up to 200 people. It tends to make the unit far less maneuverable though. This means it leans pretty far away from what the WarCraft/StarCraft fan is looking for with highly microable units.
- Comment on Warcraft 1 and 2 Remastered and the long-awaited 2.0 patch update for Warcraft 3: Reforged have just launched on PC for Warcraft's 30th anniversary 2 days ago:
I read a piece not too long ago by one of the developers of WC1. He originally had it so you could select all your units at the same time and just order them to attack. The lead designer said that was too boring and easy, so he had him limit the unit selection to groups of 4.
After trying it both ways, they agreed the smaller group limit made the game more skilful and interesting to play. Ever since then RTS games have gone towards increasing the selection cap more and more! I think it’s a mistake.
- Comment on Warcraft 1 and 2 Remastered and the long-awaited 2.0 patch update for Warcraft 3: Reforged have just launched on PC for Warcraft's 30th anniversary 2 days ago:
I loved the first one so much. I’ve been hearing the remaster for WC1 won’t have online multiplayer. That’s a huge disappointment for me. Hardly anyone ever got to experience that game multiplayer. I played it with my friend exactly once, when I brought my computer over to his house. It worked over LAN and I think also modem, but not the internet.
- Comment on Optimisation is a Slow Process 4 days ago:
Silent? No no no. The gaping hole makes loud chewing noises while the nostrils merily chat away in a sing-songy, whistly voice!
- Comment on Scales that refuse to measure if the battery isn't brand new 1 week ago:
It’s a terrible design. If they removed that dumb always on feature and used a proper physical power button the battery would last basically forever.
- Comment on Scales that refuse to measure if the battery isn't brand new 1 week ago:
Right. If your design requires 3.3V minimum then putting in a 3.3V battery and no boost converter is just dumb (or extremely user-hostile).
- Comment on Scales that refuse to measure if the battery isn't brand new 1 week ago:
That’s definitely true. But I would definitely pay more for a scale with ultra long battery life.
I made the mistake of buying an off brand digital calliper and now like an idiot I find myself removing the battery when it’s not in use just to avoid damn thing running flat in one month thanks to its atrocious standby current which enables the display to turn on instantly when I move the slide (rendering the on/off entirely moot).
- Comment on Scales that refuse to measure if the battery isn't brand new 1 week ago:
You can order 3000 3.3V low drop out (LDO) voltage regulators on LCSC for $25.50. That’s less than a penny each.
- Comment on Houses in my area increases 82% in just 4 years 1 week ago:
Right but OP is talking about a house in Waleska, Georgia, which has a population of 921 (as of 2020 census). Not really on the same level as Toronto or Vancouver!
- Comment on I bought a freeze dryer so you don't have to [1:00:14] 2 weeks ago:
This video is very long and entertaining and there’s a lot of evidence of the effort he put into it. The one real criticism I have is that it seems like he didn’t do a lot of research on what foods work well with freeze drying, preferring to do his own experiments and getting gnarly results on basically everything that isn’t already a well-known freeze dried product.
Personally I think one of the most useful things to freeze dry would be fresh, home grown herbs. Another big one is homemade soups and stocks.
As for the usefulness of freeze dried food? The big one he missed is camping and hiking. Frozen foods just aren’t going to cut it when you’re away from electricity for a week or more. You need lightweight non perishable food and for that nothing beats freeze dried. Just need to get some water from a lake or river!
- Comment on There are Minimum Wages, Why Not a Maximum Wage? 2 weeks ago:
Don’t mistake my argument for a defence of billionaires. I don’t care for them any more than anyone else here. I just want to make sure that any changes we make to the law actually work and accomplish their intended goal. Poorly-thought-out laws are worse than doing nothing: they can backfire.
To give an example, the government of Canada passed a law called the Online News Act. This law targeted Google and Facebook with a special tax, called a link tax, that would force them to pay every time they or one of their users linked to a Canadian news site. The money collected by these link taxes would then go to pay to support Canadian news agencies in general.
The law backfired. Google struck a deal with the largest Canadian newspapers to pay them a flat fee but Facebook went ahead and blocked every single link to a news site for all users in Canada. This left thousands of small, local, Canadian newspapers high and dry (they were getting most of their traffic from Facebook posts linking to them). A law intended to benefit Canadian news publishers ended up putting most of them out of business.
The point of my previous example is to show that if a company is privately held (not traded on the stock market) then how much it is actually worth is not clear or obvious at all. This makes imposition of the $1B maximum wealth limit extremely difficult to properly implement.
- Comment on There are Minimum Wages, Why Not a Maximum Wage? 2 weeks ago:
I think what we would see in response to that is people hiding their wealth offshore, through private companies, through family members, trust funds, non-profit foundations etc.
So the billionaire has 10 relatives and hires each of them at his company, giving them all stock options as a bonus, which come from his own personal accounts. Then when it comes to tax time he’s managed to limbo his way under the $1B bar.
Take all your wealth and use it to set up a bunch of non-profit organizations for preserving national parks or saving the rainforest or running homeless shelters. Then have those foundations hire your family members to the boards of directors and pay each one millions of dollars in salaries.
There are countless ways to do this. Not just for individuals but for companies. Apple is pretty infamous for its use of Ireland as a tax haven that allows it to avoid paying corporate (profit) taxes on all its sales in the EU.
The other issue I foresee with the maximum wealth limit is how much chaos it could cause for companies. Let’s say you found a furniture company and run it really well and hire tons of employees. Then over time it grows above the billion dollar limit, so in order to pay your taxes you sell off the company to private equity who proceed to liquidate all its assets and fire all the employees. Without the limit in place you may have been happy to keep running the company and maintaining a great workplace for all your employees but the giant tax bill forced your hand. In the end, the company is largely destroyed, everyone has lost their jobs, and you retire with your billion dollars in cash.
I think the above scenarios are problematic no matter what you set the limit to. It also doesn’t address the issue of private companies (not traded on the public stock exchange) which don’t have a nominal market value. Sure, they have a book value for all their hard assets, but that can be far lower than the true value of the company.
Think of something like Snapchat which went from maybe a dozen employees and a bunch of laptops to rejecting a $3 billion buyout offer from Mark Zuckerberg just 3 years later. Anyway, also how to deal with that? Let’s say you have a small company making calculator apps for iOS and Android. You earn $10,000 a year in profits from sales. Then some group of investors come together and offer you $10 billion for your company. Is your company now worth $10B just because of the offer? You’re not on the stock market. You barely make enough money to pay rent, yet come tax time you owe $9B.
You could say “well you rejected the offer so you don’t owe the government anything because you actually aren’t worth $10B.” But who decides what you’re worth? Snapchat rejected the $3B offer but most investors would’ve agreed they were worth it. But all they had was a few employees, some laptops and servers, and the app they made. They’re really not much different from the hypothetical calculator app company.
- Comment on There are Minimum Wages, Why Not a Maximum Wage? 2 weeks ago:
How does that work though? Let’s say the maximum wealth limit is one billion dollars and you own $750M of stock in the company you founded. Your wealth could go above and below that $1B limit multiple times in a day. What happens then?
- Comment on Ragrets 2 weeks ago:
Absolutely nailed the look. I’ve seen so many PhD students with that exact look!
- Comment on Row as Starmer suggests landlords and shareholders are not ‘working people’ 3 weeks ago:
Right, but I hope we’re able to see the difference between a working person who has investments and someone who earns the bulk of their income from investments. Similarly for real estate.
Because calling someone who works and has investment savings for retirement (such as a pension) “not a working person” is not just plain wrong, it’s extremely offensive, especially coming from a career politician like Starmer.
- Comment on Row as Starmer suggests landlords and shareholders are not ‘working people’ 3 weeks ago:
Are you a landlord if you let a room to help you pay bills at the end of a month? Are you a shareholder if you have a pension?
Judging by the answers here, the answer is no. But then we’re talking about millions of people who work everyday factory jobs, retail jobs, or low level office jobs.
- Comment on Nihilism spectrum 3 weeks ago:
It’s extremely common for different fields of inquiry (scientific, mathematical, philosophical, etc) to reuse common words. If we had to come up with brand new words for everything in every field then we’d all be speaking gibberish, like they do in medicine!
- Comment on ... 3 weeks ago:
Wow thanks! I’ve seen other instances of this fallacy but never knew its name (nor recognized that it is a common fallacy form).
- Comment on A decline in arable land 3 weeks ago:
Same story in Canada. A big decline in total farmland (decline of 13.1 million acres or 7.9%) but an increase of 3.6 million acres in crop land. This represents an increase in intensity and density of farmland and a decrease in farmland used for non productive applications.
One of the big differences recorded in this report is a 62% decrease in the number of people living on farms from 1971-2021. A decrease in the amount of farmland used for living spaces (farmhouse, garden, garage) may be a big factor in the above crop:farmland ratio changes, as would a consolidation of farms (total number of farms decreased from 246K to 189K from 2001-2021).
What this all says to me is that economies of scale play a huge role in North American farming, and that our subsidy structures do not favour small farms.
- Comment on Just So 5 weeks ago:
You also have to look at culture. Culture has such an enormous effect on people’s psychology and behaviour!
- Comment on Keir Starmer pins economic growth hopes on British Hollywood with new tax relief 5 weeks ago:
The tax the wealth that they can’t take out of the country. Bring in land value taxes and start raking in the revenue from all those posh London flats (more properly the land they sit on).
- Comment on the flies 5 weeks ago:
That’s for modesty!
- Comment on the flies 5 weeks ago:
No it’s to wipe the sauce off his chin after finishing a burger!
- Comment on Anon plays Splatoon 5 weeks ago:
Tropical regions? Look at the guy! This is clearly somewhere in Eastern Europe!
- Comment on stars & sharks 5 weeks ago:
Thanks for this. Now I’m on a major Wikipedia deep dive on Polaris and cepheid variables!
- Comment on When somebody backs up their argument with a 90-minute video 5 weeks ago:
The harder thing to convey is the full dimensionality of it. With the rubber sheet (or trampoline) you can show a small ball orbiting around a larger one but only in a single plane (around the “equator” of the large ball). However in reality you can orbit in any direction you like and many satellites actually orbit over the poles. Trying to show that with a small model seems extremely difficult!
- Comment on When somebody backs up their argument with a 90-minute video 1 month ago:
Oh because that incorrect analogy is the most common “lay person” analogy for describing gravitational curvature of spacetime. The most common reply from children is that it’s the earth’s gravity pulling down on the bowling ball so that the trampoline demonstration wouldn’t work in space.
Also the trampoline analogy doesn’t show us how gravitational lensing works, nor does it even touch how different gravitational reference frames affect the passage of time (GR generalizes special relativity, after all).
- Comment on When somebody backs up their argument with a 90-minute video 1 month ago:
That’s special relativity. General relativity is the theory of the curvature of spacetime as the mechanism for gravity. Large masses curve spacetime more than small masses. Under GR, gravity is not a force.
- Comment on When somebody backs up their argument with a 90-minute video 1 month ago:
I would’ve loved to hear him explain general relativity to an elementary school kid. No bowling ball on trampoline nonsense either!
- Comment on Primitive Technology: A-frame Roof Tile Factory 1 month ago:
I actually prefer to watch without captions. The lack of speaking, peaceful sounds of nature, and sounds of the work he’s doing all combine for a very relaxing watch.
Plus I also enjoy trying to figure out what he’s doing without having it explained to me.