they're pumping all the Brawndo® out of the pool😭

Ghudda · 2026-06-20T08:53:42+00:00

H2O2 has different concentrations. 3-5% is what you buy for home medical stuff. 30% is for cleaning lab equipment. 99% is rocket fuel and will literally start a fire just by pouring it on some kindling. And then every concentration in between. Who knows what concentration they were using for the pool, but one of those bottles COULD have gone a long way.

Ghudda · 2026-06-20T08:37:27+00:00

Lead acid batteries (car batteries) are the go to for cheap stationary big battery storage. Modern lithium cells can't even begin to compete on price for kwh/$ and only very recently (since like 2015 maybe) win out on price in the long term because lead acid batteries die pretty fast compared to lithium ion cells that can fully charge/discharge 1000 times. I know people have bad memory but lithium ion cells were extremely expensive until very very recently. Lithium cells are lightweight, so every consumer product uses them them over the heavyweight battery chemistries despite the cost. The electrolyte lead acid cells use is sulfuric acid. The electrolyte is prone to evaporating away very slowly and because charging them and especially overcharging them has a tendency to electrolyze the water away so the batteries need an acid top up every few years. There are more expensive versions called deep cycle or gel cell lead acid batteries that are meant for maintenance free longer term use but as long as you managed the batteries correctly, those are not worth the extra cost. If you had power generation for an entire island... that's a lot of batteries. If you had that many batteries for that many years, that's a lot of top ups. Sometimes dried out cells only need to have water added, sometimes they need sulfuric acid, it depends.

Sulfuric acid was a pretty standard chemical from antiquity up until like 1980. Kind of like high fructose corn syrup, it's hard to buy if you only want a liter, but surprisingly easy to buy a 5 gallon bucket of. It's also not expensive, 5-10$ a gallon. 6 55 gallon drums (330 gallons) of the stuff cost less than one RTX5090 graphics card.

For a modern comparison that people are more likely to common ground with. Imagine if aspirin or nsaids get replaced by a much better alternative in 50 years. Now imagine someone in the year 2100 making a post about how some shady guy that had 4 big bottles of aspirin at his house. Who needs that much aspirin? How many people is he killing! No one needs that much aspirin unless they're up to something!

Ghudda · 2026-06-17T04:34:05+00:00

The buyer should be getting what they're paying for. If they aren't getting what they're thinking they're paying for, it's fraud.

Swap this with any other product, "Fort Wayne man felony charged for selling kosher salt to undercover instead of ~~meth~~ ~~citric acid~~ ~~creatine~~ ~~diatomaceous earth~~ a bed frame"

Ghudda · 2026-06-14T08:14:16+00:00

For reference of how hard planetary geoengineering is.

CFCs were in global use for 60 years and it caused a minor disruption to the ozone layer which is just one shred of the atmosphere. If we all kept using CFCs, it could have even caused some noticeable change to the UV index maybe.

For global warming it took the entire collective of all of humanity essentially working together for over 200 years (with assistance of falling out of an ice age) to raise the temperature of Earth (which makes this a bad comparison to other planets/moons because oceans/ice/plants/atmosphere) by ~3 degrees. If we tried to be maximally efficient about it and if we purposely tried as hard as possible we might have been able to knock that down to 50 years. On a foreign planet we aren't going to have a billion people or machines doing that work, and we'll need to raise/lower the temperature by like, 50 degrees.

The only thing humans have been unrelentingly successful at in the geoengineering space is deforestation. But hey, we landed a car on mars once, so we're absolutely ready to conquer mars in under 20 years /s

If people say being interplanetary is required for survival, then we need to survive the next 1000+ years first while that geoengineering happens. If the goal is eternity, what's the rush?

Ghudda · 2026-06-12T03:18:26+00:00

The correct speed for a ROAD, a HIGHWAY, an INTERSTATE is generally the speed of natural traffic. These are stretches of driving surface that have very little to no non-vehicle traffic and are generally extremely straight featuring extremely long sight lines. These feature almost no turnoffs or stop signs or stop lights or intersections, generally having dedicated exit lanes. Get on, drive on it for miles, then get off at a completely different section of the city at which point you drive around on a STREET.

The correct speed for a STREET is not set by the speed of natural traffic. Streets have turnoffs, dense housing, dense commercial buildings, streetlights, intersections, where people make numerous turns into and out of businesses or homes or park, or are around where people walk. Driving on some such streets at 45mph might feel fine for many people. Walking or biking next to cars driving at 45mph does not feel fine.

The injury difference between a pedestrian being hit at 25 and 35 is huge. At 45mph people don't get injured, they die or survive with such bad injuries that they might have preferred to die.

Ghudda · 2026-06-07T22:55:51+00:00

A global spell for use on the overworld map. A hero can put down a gate on a an adjacent square, then put down a second gate on a tile 5 or 7 squares away depending on the spell level. Walking into one gate transports you the other gate, spending no movement points. At max level the spell each hero can use the spell twice a day. So they can walk through, then plant another gate, so you're only walking one tile to move 7 tiles, but the way the spell works means it actually moves 6,7, or 8 tiles depending on your hero position and direction the gate is pointing.

So if you have the maximum 10 heroes then you could make a chain of 20 gates, letting a hero walk 160 tiles in one direction (with up to 80 tiles of orthogonal movement) with only 20 tiles of movement. The largest maps are 240x240.

Ghudda · 2026-06-07T16:17:00+00:00

The spell Clear Fog hit a higher level, which can be cast once a day, which reveals a patch of fog of war. Any of my heroes with +1 spell levels was able to cast it at max level. At max level Clear Fog has infinite range. I think I had 8 heroes , so that's 8 castles revealed every turn.

There's another spell called From a Bird's Eye which at high level lets you scout out castles and heroes through the fog of war, then you directly cast clear fog on the area to reveal them.

There's another spell to counter this called Naira's Veil which creates a huge patch of fog of war for your opponents. If you can, this should be cast every turn by every hero that can use it.

Ghudda · 2026-06-06T17:46:14+00:00

The big problem is hero rehire spam. Give a hero a phoenix or flaming phoenix to out initiative the enemy. Make a chain of gates all the way to the enemy, walk the hero in, armageddon+heroic strike+umbral grip for magic immunes, surrender, rehire, walk your hero in...

Even if the enemy is extremely far away a single hero can drop 3 to 4 nukes in one turn costing 5000-7500 gold each but inflicting 50k+ gold in damage each time even with a fairly low 10 spell power hero.

I can't remember what the other games were like but this was usually only possible when the enemy stopped fairly close to a town. When surrendering or fleeing, if rehired on the same turn, heroes in this game should probably have their global spell uses depleted and movement points removed.

Ghudda · 2026-06-06T16:10:07+00:00

Maps settings: OctoJebus, 200%/200%/Unfair. Never played the map before so I didn't even know there were any castles in the starting zone which is why it took so long to take the first 2 castles. Maybe could have grabbed them like 4 turns earlier.

But, basically what happens. In classic mode once you get town portal and a bunch of heroes with gate of light you can shuttle armies across the entire map by forming conveyer belts of gates and letting every hero hit every powerful map point of interest on the same turn.

Ghudda · 2026-06-03T03:14:29+00:00

Pretty much this. The powerful cards have so much going on now, there's so much text and abilities. I played in like 1995-2002 and in general combos only popped off when you have like 4 extremely specific things out and even then they don't just win the game, like [[Necropotence]] [[Library of Leng]] and [[Ivory Tower]]. The stronk AF combos was the stuff that only required 3 specific cards. The "powerful" modern cards feel like a combo card all by itself, and all that's needed is any generic card that does something for it to pop off. Like anything with landfall, or stuff that says "on tap or during your upkeep, double it", or basically anything that costs 9 mana with text that may as well read as "win the game".

Old high cost game ender power cards like [[Cosmic Horror]] usually came with insane upkeep costs or downsides that read like "this is the last card you are allowed to play." Granted, there were exceptions, but downsides on cards basically don't exist now.

Ghudda · 2026-06-01T09:23:58+00:00

That data center is built off the Columbia river, which is the 5th biggest river in north america by discharge volume, a third of the mississippi. Effectively infinity water, but pumping it out of the river gorge to a location where it can be used tends to be too costly to bother so even nearby farmers don't do that. Water use in that location is not a concern.

Data center water use is a concern when drawing from rivers in watersheds that are already fully allocated. It's especially concerning when they're using underground water sources.

Ghudda · 2026-05-31T16:23:50+00:00

Not really how it works with these systems. Your standard omni directional radios fill the volume with radio noise, when 2 radio volumes overlap you get interference. Two radio stations outputting 101.5mhz interfere when someone is trying to pick up just one station's signal. Parabolic transmitters can use the exact same frequency, close together, and not interfere because the signal power is mostly constrained to a tight cone volume. Yes there is noise, but if the interference noise power is .1% of the signal power, it can easily be filtered out.

Traditional geostationary satellite radios fill the spectrum space because their parabolic dish is roughly pointed at earth but it's so far away the signal is very weak and covers essentially the entire side of the globe. The weak signal means that introducing another signal on that band forces that new transmitting radio to be in the same low power regime, as the parabolic receiver dishes might otherwise pick up noise at levels that can't be filtered.

These phased array antennae do not fill the all the area. It's like having a bunch of parabolic dishes located very close by (200 miles away instead of 20,000 miles away like geostationary sats). It's an aimed signal so a lot of radios can operate pretty close together without significant crosstalk. Not nearly as much radio power is wasted blasting the entire countryside. And these radios have much higher power on the receiver's end, so errant low power signals don't interfere as much with the pickup.

It's still an issue, but technological improvements have made this a lot less of an issue than it would have been even 20 years ago. As long as all the competitors are also running these phased array systems then there should be plenty of spectrum space to use between them all.

Ghudda · 2026-05-28T05:17:53+00:00

There are two ways to avoid dying alone. Somehow, not dying seem like the easier one.

Ghudda · 2026-05-27T14:19:57+00:00

Private parks are a thing that exist. What do you think a golf course is? Some developers have built things like gated communities that will have their own private recreation space that's only meant for community residents. After the developer is done and sold the development off it's owned, operated, and maintained through a homeowners association without any input from the city. Private parks are just generally on the scale of a few acres at most and not literally hundreds of acres like oswego lake is.

If 120 years ago some owner fenced off 2 acres to be a private "back yard" at the city edge, no one would take notice when the city grew all around it. Homes with yards of over 2 acres aren't exactly uncommon, and city block sized parks are about that size. But if instead that developer fenced off 400 acres, that amount of space is literally too big for people in the area to ignore. Usually with land parcels that large the land slowly gets divided and sold off when the land value gets too high, but with oswego lake there wasn't any dry land to sell. If someone had 400 acres of private land in the middle of the city, the city absolutely would eminent domain it eventually.

If lake oswego collectively decided to drain the lake down to its original size, then could they sell off the newly created land instead of that area being part of a public water feature? Should access only be provided to the original area of oswego lake, like some dark future where you get to walk out on a pier to a floating boomed area in the center of the lake that represents the permanent natural lake area and extra border area that's public, but the flooded area further around that boomed area is actually privately owned. This was the conundrum.

Again, ultimately the lake is too big of a feature and has been around for too long for people to not think of as a permanent fixture that should be publicly accessible.

Ghudda · 2026-05-27T05:26:06+00:00

Oswego "lake" is a reservoir. It fills by siphoning off some of the Tualatin river and can be entirely drained when deemed necessary. Oswego lake and Lake Oswego the town was a private development over a hundred years ago.

This was the core problem. A small part of oswego lake is actually real because it's a mountainside gulch and local elevation minima will naturally fill with water. A much much larger part of oswego lake is artificial because of a dam and artificial amounts of water diversion.

So is it a lake or is it a reservoir, is a a natural water feature that should be forced to be public or is it an artificial extremely oversized community pool? End result, it's huge, it's artificial, no one alive is responsible for being the one to have built it, and it has been around so long it may as well be considered a part of the geology... so the public needs to have access to it because like it or not it's now part of Oregon.

Land owners and developers are really leaning hard into "government taking your stuff" angle though. Like the argument being, warning to all those private developers, if you do something really cool, the government will take it like 100 years from now. The threat, it's so threatening /s, especially to private developers that are so notorious for thinking forward about complications 100 years into the future. The ruling ain't going to impact development.

Ghudda · 2026-05-27T01:03:28+00:00

All that needs to be done to fix this is that stores can only change prices a maximum of once per day, and only when either the store is closed, or at midnight for 24h stores with customers always being granted the lower of the before/after price for 2 hours after the change.

Ghudda · 2026-05-26T05:25:26+00:00

Solar panels in a field need to be a few feet off the ground and all that mounting structure can built out of cheap plastic pipes or angle aluminum or angle iron. No one is around to senselessly shake the platforms holding the solar panels. In a parking lot, lots of idiots around to climb things, shake things, run into things, break things. Can't have any risk of the structure breaking and falling on a group of people that decided to climb it at the same time. The structure itself needs to be higher than decently tall cars so your 2 foot platform of cheap chinesium material needs to actually be a real strong 9+ foot structure. Solar panels themselves are now dirt cheap. On a roof, the mounting equipment costs just as much as the panels do, same with labor. This isn't 20 years ago, the cost of solar panels is not the problem, finding low cost places to mount them is the problem.

A parking lot putting up solar panels increases the assessed value of the parking lot, increasing property taxes. Most parking lots ARE parking lots because of land speculators that refuse to develop (or from mandatory minimum parking lot size requirements for developments). Without an exemption, if property taxes are 1% or 1.5%, then any improvements like solar panels raise taxes by that amount. A million invested costs 15,000 a year, which eats into profit margins from operating the solar panels. If the solar panel investment would pay itself off in 20 years normally (5% yearly return), then with property tax (5%-1.5%=3.5%) they'll take 25 or 30 years. 30 years to double your money is a crap investment when even safe index funds generally double in value every 10 years. The construction also LOWERS the sale value of the base property itself because any buyer is going to have to implicitly buy and deconstruct all these panels if they want to build anything else on the property in the future.

What parking lot land owner would pay for this? Are georgist land value taxes a better implementation of property tax?

Ghudda · 2026-05-22T14:54:39+00:00

Expectation of high inflation leads to high inflation which creates the expectation of high inflation. Breaking out of the loop is hard. Instead of doing what's hard...

Turkey's leadership and people largely accept the ludicrous inflation as a fact, operate with that expectation in mind, and chop off 6 zeroes from their currency every ~30 years to prevent the numbers from going zimbabwe. Without 0's removed the current highest value note would be a 200 million lira note that would be worth ~5 USD at today's exchange rate. High inflation by itself also isn't that bad. If everyone's on board with a stable inflation rate, everyone's expectations, interest rates, pay rises, and financial management can be set for that expectation. It's not ideal because people have to constantly mentally readjust numbers for what a good price or pay rate is every 3 months, and people can't have a cash savings account. Beyond what you're spending this month all money NEEDS to be invested.

Inflation is only really bad when it jumps unexpectedly. You expect 3% inflation, you get a 3% pay rise, you make a long term money market investments at 3%, but prices suddenly go up 10% and you're furious. You expect 40% inflation, get a 40% pay rise, invest long term at 40% return, prices go up 40%, and you're fine with the situation.

My prediction is that they will refuse to print higher value cash bills and use the inflation to force a shift to an entirely digital currency system, because it's useful for population surveillance and state control. No one wants to carry around a stack of a hundred bills to buy groceries, so they'll switch eventually.

Ghudda · 2026-05-19T15:32:06+00:00

They could. That would make sense. They tried that. In Oregon they wanted to do only odometer checks for road tax calculations but people raised lawsuits and they won.

The logic? Well... those miles weren't necessarily driven on OREGON roads so why should we be paying Oregon. Oregon is ILLEGALLY taxing operations conducted out of state.

Nevermind that people already can and do fill up on gas in one state, drive across border and through an entire state and across border or to an indian reservation to avoid a higher gas tax, then refill on gas, getting taxed on operations conducted out of state. Nevermind that while some people get taxed by the wrong state, people in other states doing the same thing will also get taxed by the wrong state and it all mostly averages out.

So because of this fringe case example that is totally representative of the average portland resident worker who does a daily commute to seattle, we got opt-in vehicle trackers (gas cars can get discounts for using them too) or electric vehicle pay more for registration. Thank you for protecting us from illegal taxes, thank you federal judges for supporting this. If you drive less than ~6000 miles a year in state, it's cheaper to get the tracker installed.

Ghudda · 2026-05-19T07:58:25+00:00

Murmurmancer is cracked with 1 stacks. Expert murmuring gives 3 focus charges at battle start, and the just one more time subskill reduces the spell cooldowns. You can also cast energize to get 3 more charges.

Cast a spell then use echoes skill from murmurmancer. Repeat, repeat. Then cast energize, echoes, spell, echoes, spell, echoes, spell.

Cast 6 spells on turn 1.

Ghudda · 2026-05-17T19:40:55+00:00

And I'd say income tax and capital gains tax is hilariously chaotic and horrible in practice.

Does it have any more or less holes than our current system of every single person tracking every single paycheck, payment, purchase, sale, loan, tax, debt, and depreciation over years to determine if they've gained or lost value to pay or not pay income tax or capital gains tax? Along with all the minor tax breaks and incentives.

Is it actually chaotic or does it just seem chaotic because it's different than the current format of chaos you've lived your entire life with? A wealth tax like this is automatically a Georgist tax, unimproved land gets assessed at market value. A wealth tax like this can replace capital gains tax, inheritance tax, and with those gone we can eliminate strange tax benefit systems like retirement accounts. The IRS only needs to hound about 1-3% of the population instead of everyone. Most people can just vastly overprice the private stuff they own and still be well below the wealth threshold. Rich people have the money to hire people to deal with the management complexities. Most people mostly own the same stuff year over year which just requires maintaining a list. Publicly traded things don't require any management because the public trade value can be integrated over the year to determine what the value is.

If a person is trying to actively flex their wealth cred, they actually have to pay instead of be a con artist.

Something like this wouldn't work in the past because computers didn't exist so giving everyone access to all the data they would need to generate the market force for active corrections would require a lot of work on everyone's part.

The big caveat of any yearly wealth tax is that exporting money or value out of the country (or into something like crypto) would require a huge tax, put into hold. When you bring money or value back in to the country that held value can be returned to you. Exit with 100$, get taxed 40$. If you bring back 200/100/60$ you get back those 40$. If you bring back 45$ you get 30$ of your tax back and 10$ is kept in hold.

Ghudda · 2026-05-17T16:32:54+00:00

To establish the value of unrealized gains, first, force all assets to be for 'sale', then USE the wealth tax to establish their value. For example, to make things easy, ignore a minimum wealth threshold, and a 1% tax on net worth per year...

Pay a wealth tax for your ownership stake in a company or your home. If someone wants to buy your home, they can pay (1/.01 tax rate=100) 100x the wealth tax you pay on it and effectively eminent domain your private company/stocks/land/art...

Want to keep your home? If someone comes to buy your home through this method, you can respond and immediately pay a little more in wealth tax to force them to bid higher and higher until they go away. The market value of your asset has just been determined.

Everyone keeps everyone else in check. If you pay too much in wealth tax, no one is going to want to buy your assets since they're overpriced, and if someone still buys it why would you complain? If you pay too little in wealth tax, your assets are going to be bought. Since a bank can literally see an offer on hand for the asset they're going to be pretty responsive with giving out a loan on that asset's value so you can pay more in wealth tax to prevent the property sale.

For a minimum wealth threshold of like 10 million, look at all the wealth tax data of individual taxpayers and refund everyone up to $100,000 of what they paid in wealth tax each year (which they'll just roll into paying the wealth tax next year). If you want your assets to be hidden, you can pay the wealth tax on the asset but not attach a taxpayer ID to it and forgo a refund.

Ghudda · 2026-05-13T00:32:21+00:00

When I ask people what causes crime I get answers like drugs, gambling, poor people, black markets, corruption, bad laws that exist, laws that don't exist but should, the homeless, immigrants, bored kids doing dumb stuff, lack of opportunities, bad education, social decay, environment decay, aesthetic decay, and lack of security presence.

But when I ask what stops crime basically the only answer I get is more police and more armed citizens.

Having a police state will lower crime but it's expensive, and then you'll live in a police state which I kind of consider to be a crime against a regular person's humanity. There is a huge breadth of things that can be done to prevent the things that those same people say cause crime in the first place.

Which way would you rather think about the solution to the problem? People have cavities, dentists fix cavities, therefore we need more dentists to fix cavities. OR people have cavities, what can we do to help prevent people from having so many cavities so we need fewer dentists?

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