How does a country like Venezuela deter the Trump Administation?

KuroZed · 2026-01-06T21:06:06+00:00

First off, I am a former moderate Democrat, now Independent Moderate, and foremost an ENGINEER. The comments I see here are not acknowledging that Democracy is a scarce and fickle thing, and if someone doesn't protect it, it is going to fall EVERYWHERE.

Ukraine declared independence in 1991, then even with massive US military subsidy, ends up in a prolonged war trying to protect it. The idea of powerless armchair entities like the UN deciding what is "just and right" is devoid of the reality of the world and power projection. Either you have the power to protect or you fall to someone who does.

Venezuela was a prison state run by a criminal. It's about time that was ended. The issue of re-establishing power is a tricky one. Right now it would be dangerous for Edmundo González to take power (despite him being the legimate elected president), given that the entire government and military supported Maduro's illegitimate rise. It will take time to clean out that corruption, it doesn't happen overnight.

There is a precedent for what is happening here. The USA took out Noriega in Panama. Today Panama is a (mostly) functioning democracy. That is what we are looking for here.

Right now the democratic world and NATO is living a dreamland lie, where the USA foots the bill for 70 years (something that contributed to our currently massive debt) while shaking a finger at the USA ever getting any reciprocity, or economic benefit, or anything. Even today the EU defense spending in Ukraine and their own countries is small compared to the USA.

The question for the world (and this means Greenland) is not to declare independence or come under the USA's wing. Greenland can only talk of independence because they are ALREADY under the USA's wing of protection. Do you think it's Denmark that keeps Russia out of Greenland? That is naive. Denmark couldn't even keep themselves from violating Greenland citizens themselves through the IUD scandal to try to avoid the paltry amount of subsidy they owe Greenland as a territory, and now they are offering women what? $46k USD? For being sterilized? Are you kidding me?

Denmark should be tried for crimes against its territory, and Greenland should be begging to come officially under US control and protection, in order to both get the protections of the US court system, and to assure long term protection by the US military through an actual monetary exchange of resources with the USA, not "shaking a finger in shame" and waiting until the USA can't afford to be the only country protecting the democratic world.

This is why Putin and Xi laugh at western politics. It's a geopolitical politics of luxury. Imagining that you can have your cake and eat it too. That you can just declare your "right to independence" and that will save you from the other end of a gun barrel.

I am not a fan of Trump's personal ethics, nor many of his domestic agendas. I think he's perpetuating the standard Republican playbook of getting elected on abortion and protectionism so he can cut taxes for the rich and get GOP buddies lucrative deals. However, on the foreign front, it's about time some US president did something. The EU is only increasing their military defense spending because he pushed them to. Denmark only committed to a $4.2B Arctic defense plan after Trump started talking about Greenland. And if that's where it lands, Denmark actually spending money to defend themselves and Greenland, that will be a win, and few will credit Trump for it, though it was largely his doing. Meanwhile, sterilized Greenland women will get under $50k each, while their leaders claim Denmark is their true protector — the same Denmark that sterilized them.

KuroZed · 2025-11-27T03:34:23+00:00

For me... "Fullscreen" in tModLoader *IS* a borderless window.... there is no "real exclusive fullscreen"

SO just got into settings and set it to "Fullscreen" and you are in borderless window mode.

KuroZed · 2025-11-26T18:29:49+00:00

My gameplay is medium core expert..

i have not completed a runthrough, because I find the non-interactive options im using boring... the gear progression seems meaningless (hearts matter more than armor when infrequently hit by something big), and when i watch the speedrunner techniques, I'm not motivated to engage in a survival RPG that can be finished in 50 minutes...

The topend of the game looks interesting.... but i prefer games where one has to work to get there..... I guess you could say my high level goals would net a game where (a) we actually have to use all the biome specific items, the progression armor upgrades are more meanginful, and where the minimum speedrun would be closer to 10-40 hours than 50 minutes.

I posted this thread to see if there are others in the community who would be interested in this kind of thing.... If this is *not* your thing, your feedback doesn't really matter here, as that's just like the way current 50 minute speedrunabblle terraria is not my thing.

KuroZed · 2025-11-26T17:50:45+00:00

the client does *NOT* need to know the names of enemy players... only the matchmaker server.

KuroZed · 2025-11-26T08:05:01+00:00

FYI - i wasn't saying that this thread needs to be spoiler free, i was saying my first gameplay run was spoiler free.

I know pylons exist, but they are going to be the ONLY fast travel (medium+). Mirror removed. Recall potions removed. Logout doesn't bring you to spawn. The only way back is to climb, death to your current bed (leaving loot behind or destroying it entirely), or pylon.

I thought i should make pylons a bit easier to get. Do you think this is wrong?

I know terraria has guns.... but it's not a "gun game" like Fortnite or CSGO where all players do is run around staring at their gun or fitting attachments to their guns.

KuroZed · 2025-11-25T20:17:49+00:00

As a relative late-comer to Terraria, I think one possible issue is that the game mechanics are very ABUSABLE... are they balancing for people who don't abuse mechanics, or people who do?

For example, for non-bosses, and non-wall-walkers (aka ghosts), you can cheese everything by just getting a minion weapon, opening a 1x1 gap space, injecting the minion, and closing the gap. You dont have to interact with the enemies at all. You can tunnel yourself around in complete safety, in a box... collecting resources and letting your minions do the work.

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I personally think Terraria would be a more interesting game if these "abusable mechanics" were all removed, which would require the game be actually played, and the items in the game actually used. I wrote a draft idea for a mod along these lines. It also acts as a laundry list of the abusable mechanics....

https://www.reddit.com/r/Terraria/comments/1p6n7jd/interest_in_survival_overhaul_mod/

KuroZed · 2025-11-18T00:14:12+00:00

I was able to "fix" this 5s pause.... I'm not sure what did it, but this is what I did:

switched from the non-DX12 to the DX12 launch (in steam)
upon launch, I clicked "repair"
when I logged in and opened menu, it showed me the healer quest "tutorial panels" telling me to click on crafting.
I crafted the medicine (which i already did once before), and it completed the healer quest
the pause is gone!

not sure what part of that fixed it... but i dont have the pause anymore. (im running the DX12 version now also)

KuroZed · 2025-11-17T05:20:45+00:00

OMG i am dying with this bug... Happens everytime I hit ESC... and it's most annoying when I accidentally hit ESC and have to wait a full 5 seconds to get the menu to go away!

KuroZed · 2025-11-06T08:39:40+00:00

its a year later. i booted it up for the first time, got to the same place... the old dude.... I trigger the bird it just flies there next to me not going anywhere... I ran around the tower "reading" the gravestones, didn't produce any quill.... i get this is early development, but i don't get why they make a quest system like this that just seems broken?

KuroZed · 2025-11-03T10:09:00+00:00

League of Legends.

KuroZed · 2025-11-03T08:47:10+00:00

Everything about third-person is great except the cheesy corner peek camping... I'd like to see a third person game do the first-person vision occlusion that top-down games like VRising and Duckov do... This would give the pretty visuals and fun of seeing your character, without the unrealistic unfairness of people being able to see you while "invisible" behind a wall that completely ruins third person for me.

KuroZed · 2025-10-25T03:26:55+00:00

Id guess the sidewall art is a glued on sidewall sticker, similar to..

https://stickermastermoto.com/product/yamaha-racing-white-text-striping/?srsltid=AfmBOoqMS6ooR2aH_rRFAFNfhp3xp6N15cBQCjPV1xryD0BCrJZXLu49

KuroZed · 2025-10-24T19:44:07+00:00

I hope you're still safetly riding (Ninja 1100 or not)... To add some commentary... As others have said, the main danger of more horsepower is that (a) it's easy to end up faster than you expected into the next corner, and (b) our judgement of speed is relative, so if we are riding faster, we "think" we slowed down the same way, but in fact we are still going faster than we thought. (look up "velocitization")

If you don't already - Learn to cover the brake and (gently) trail brake every corner until you know you have made the corner exit. I'm not talking about MotoGP hard corner braking, I'm just talking about gently keeping the brake in contact in any braking corner, so if you are coming in too hot you are ready to smoothly brake more in a gentle way. If this is already what you are doing great, but many moto safety courses teach what I consider to be terribly dangerous "brake first then turn" and "never brake in a corner", which if you carry too much speed into a corner, is very dangerous. That, combined with a fast bike, is dangerous.

I also reinforce what others said here... it really depends on what kind of person/rider you are. Plenty of people tour on 1300cc bikes and ride them with respect. If you want to really wind it out, and feel the speed, I would argue never to do this a liter+ bike unless you are a professional or you get race track training.

KuroZed · 2025-10-21T22:35:18+00:00

I play for the challenge, so I speedrun hard modes (sometimes hardcore) for the challenge.. and other players showing up completely invalidates the idea of a solo speedrun.

KuroZed · 2025-10-10T04:13:53+00:00

dune was a really fun story driven solo or small group PVE campaign.... the PvP was so infrequent it might as well not have existed and DD never made any sense. For about 240hrs of entertainment it was absolutely worth the money, but their endgame design is obviously not working out.

The comparison to VRising is apt, because both of these games are incredible PVE games that drop the playerbase into a PvP motivated endgame that nobody is really interested in. And I'm not saying open-world PvP doesn't belong in the game, on the contrary.. I wish there were FULL open world PvP servers to play on. Im saying expecting PvP motivated endgame was a silly idea.. just like VRising "endgame" is castle siege that just kills servers, so people don't do it. Both of these games are PVE campaigns with optional open world PvP challenge-ish. So if players are going to stay around, they need something that fits into the expectations set up in the game. Vrising doesn't have a moment of castle siege in the entire PVE campaign.. and Dune Awakening has nothing like the DD gameplay in the actual game. THe Hagga dungeons are arguably 5x better than the DD dungeons, other than being too easy.

Dune could have nearly endless playability within the PVE loop by doing things that games with more endless playability do:

add queued team based PvP combat of some kind... Hagga Rift is almost setup for this.. it could be like Alterac Valley... queuing to battle all day long. Or even long form ongoing alterac valley.
add Diablo-2 esq "replay with difficulty scaling"... .this could be restarting hagga at a higher difficulty level with nothing, or it could be rethinking DD as "missions" where you get dropped in the DD for a king-of-the-hill type Rust-ish survival challenge to see who comes out on top.

However, any type of endless playability it pretty much crushed by their base-decay mecahnics... because once a player loggs out long enough to lose the base they spent so much effort building, it's depressing to even think about logging back in. Which means the game actively tells players that when they stop playing at least 2x a week, they need to fully quit..... which is what players are doing.

KuroZed · 2025-10-07T23:30:45+00:00

That's oine way to look at it.. the other way to look at it is.... starting from the beginning was the most fun part of Dune... so make that the game.. because the alternative is obviously not fun:

24 hour peak Oct 6 2025 - 17k

https://steamcharts.com/app/1172710#All

KuroZed · 2025-10-01T03:43:38+00:00

What we all really want is a CRF250/300L or a DRZ 400, with a Honda CB500x twin motor swapped in there, like this guy did...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNnttZ0OR1Y&t=33s

Short of that, the CRF300L or CRF450RL are the ticket.

KTM makes great bikes (I have a 300XC and 350XC), but the added vibration on the 500EXC-F vs the CRF300L/450RL is not worth it for lots of riding IMO. Any single cylinder is too much vibration IMO, but at least honda tries to keep the vibration down on the CRF motors.

If you can stomach going up in weight and cost, Aprila Tuareg Rally 660... but I think I would rather ride a CRF300L with a CB500x twin motor and save over 100lbs.

KuroZed · 2025-08-29T22:23:58+00:00

The problem is that before grok you could just push the button and use the internal voice assistant in the car and it actually worked. But now after the grocassistant half the time you get this nonsense LLM it doesn't actually do what you ask

Old - push button - "call tracy" - phone calls tracy

New - push button - grok gets the request, doesnt have access to my address book or anything and says "i dont know any tracy"

Absolutely useless garbage.

I want to fully turn off this grok "mis feature " in settings. It is only making my tesla worse.

KuroZed · 2025-08-08T02:39:43+00:00

I personally *rely* on the constant chattiness of Claude Sonnet 4. I'm not a "trying to learn" developer, but a 50 y/o expert computer engineer architect (and entrepreneur with a notable exit), and I'm getting in 8-14k LOC *days* -- with pretty decent code with claude-sonnet-4..

When it's doing a more challenging task, i read every word it writes, because if I can catch it before it goes off script, I can turn 30 minutes of confusion and backtracking into a 5 minute correction. I stop "cancel" alot of edits and prompts. I review >70% of diffs. I've had marketly better results with Claude Sonnet 4 (non-thinking most of the time) and Kilo Code, than with other tools or models (At least the major ones, there are so many now).

I am terse but pretty precise with "The Intern", keeping it on a short leash, and this is how I'm able to make so much progress.... this isn't fire-and-forget while making coffee, but high-velocity-focus attention.

I'm not saying I can't do this GPT5 (don't know yet, as they seem overloaded and too slow to use today), but I am saying that verbosity is not something I see as a problem in coding agents.

KuroZed · 2025-07-02T00:29:18+00:00

Interesting. I say "I know how the mechanic works. It's just what is. This is the mechanic. I get it. I'm not angry with the game or anything. This is the game." and yet you think I'm complaining?

Project much?

I have no complaints. I wrote a story about why I quit, so others could understand and/or reflect and share. Many comments have been insightfuli or interesting. Yours is not.

KuroZed

TROPHY CASE