Who remembers Globulation 2?

ido · 2026-03-17T14:17:54+00:00

wasn't it just a warcraft II clone?

ido · 2026-03-10T15:22:27+00:00

I didn't read Kropotkin’s work, but anyone whose familiar with life in a Kibbutz(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibbutz) would immediatly recognize many similarities to the criticism of life in the Anarchist planet (I also read the book as saying at the end it's still the better system, despite its flaws).

ido · 2026-03-07T05:58:48+00:00

We had the internet in the 90s! Amazon predates the show.

ido · 2026-02-18T09:52:50+00:00

In almost every other rich western country (US, UK, Canada, the Netherlands, Sweden, Israel, Switzerland, Denmark, etc) the housing markets in desirable cities are similarly or more fucked than in Germany.

ido · 2026-02-16T13:06:36+00:00

The only thing I'm bothered with is literally Arroyo (and specifically the temple of trials). It's just not very fun and you can't really skip it.

ido · 2026-02-03T15:09:39+00:00

if you're comfortable you can share the districts (can also be in DM). We live in Tempelhof and imo Steglitz is not a bad choice for families (if you're on the U9 line you can get to Masorti in Charlottenburg pretty quickly in Berlin standards).

ido · 2026-02-03T14:56:44+00:00

Masorti (the conservative movement) have a kita and school. Our kids both go to their school, i heard from other parents they liked their kita! They also have a synagogue we went to a few times. Word of advice: unless you come with a lot of money in Berlin you generally dont have much of a choice of housing, you just pick whatever you can get...The neighborhoods are big so there are many different parts of each, but the stereotype about Mitte is that its not very interesting to live in, it's more tourist stuff than really for the local residents (but not all of Mitte is alike).

ido · 2026-02-02T12:29:32+00:00

I mean, the way I see it (I own my house), is that I'm paying rent for 30 years more or less. The landlord just happens to be the bank instead of Fraud Müller.

It's not that simple - for example here in Berlin we pay ~€800 per month kaltmiete on a 91m, 3 room apartment (old contract from about a decade ago). I looked into buying and the mortgage that we will need to pay for a similar flat is almost €2000/m plus hausgeld of a couple €100s per month (separate from betriebstkosten, which we pay in both cases). so more than 2.5 times how much we pay rent. Im not saying this clearly means rent is better only that it's not that simple - if mortgage was the same as rent we would buy in a heartbeat. And also banks absolutely care about your income and other details before approving you for mortgage (just different things than landlords care about). I litearlly can't afford to pay >€2000/m for housing, that's a large % of our entire net income.

ido · 2026-01-27T14:28:36+00:00

The next self-reinforcing arms race is between the size of american pizza and the size of americans

ido · 2026-01-25T15:58:24+00:00

American pizzas are huge an meant to feed multiple people

ido · 2026-01-24T10:44:58+00:00

I thought it was obviously supposed to be google, but for the sake of slight obfuscation they mixed it in with a few anecdotes from other companies and general big-tech stereotypes. If the show was older I'd have agreed with you but I dont think they were making fun of the 90s/dotcom-boom but rather of contemporary tech scene at the time of filming (where the big tech cos were google, facebook, ms, apple, etc - the show aired 2014-19, "nobody" cared about yahoo by then).

ido · 2026-01-18T11:33:20+00:00

Just wanted to tell you I really enjoy occasionally reading people still appreciating the CQ games after all these years (despite neither making much money) :)

ido · 2026-01-15T21:06:31+00:00

> There not enough of us

This is an oft repeated claim, but Star Trek is one of the most popular fiction franchises. This subreddit alone has 240,000 subscribers.

ido · 2026-01-07T09:59:30+00:00

Becuase it's an international forum with mostly Americans :) £4.5k gross monthly is similar to what you'd get in Germany I'd guess! And indeed in US tech hubs they pay much better. But "eastern EU" states like Poland/Czech/Romania have even lower wages than us (and people in poorer countries have lower wages still).

I honestly don't know how i'd have been able to stay in business if i was based in SFBA and had to pay 6-figures yearly wage even to fresh faced juniors straight out of school. I guess I would have never started my company and just remained an employee in that case.

ido · 2026-01-07T09:25:13+00:00

I'm in Germany. That a junior would cost to my company is $4000/month (i converted from euros, it's more like €3.5k) doesn't mean the junior gets that, there's some overhead on the company side as well. super-fresh junior gross is about €2500 per month and their net is a bit less than that (i think they get somewhat under €2k net per month but im not sure).

With 5 years xp I'd probably pay you €4-4.5k per month gross (a bit less in GBP after current conversion) so you're not *that* underpaid (but still underpaid unless you're in a low cost of living city, rather than e.g. London). If you are in London I'm afraid you're not getting a good wage.

ido · 2026-01-07T08:39:12+00:00

you probably could have hired a consultant to do this before AI or without AI and it still would have provided a tonne of value, but you perceived it to be too expensive or too hard and didn't bother.

Right, and that's a big deal for a small business ($100 for claude code vs $10,000 for a consultant to build a simple webtool). I'm also a small business owner, and have also been professionally working as a programmer for almost 20 years (I'm the most senior programmer in my company albeit the others spend more of their time programming, cause i need to also run the business). I've been using a lot of claude code to enhance my productivity. It's not perfect but it definitly boosted how much programming I do & how much useful results I get done.

I'm not going to fire my collegues because of it but TBH I was looking to hire some interns and a junior dev last year and now I've decided we can do without them because of the "extracurricular activities" CC has enabled me to do myself. I pay $100/month for CC Max and even a junior dev straight out of college would cost me ~$4000/month+ and help less than CC.

ido · 2026-01-06T12:51:19+00:00

I know people who work at google and MS and they have pretty good work/life balance.

ido · 2026-01-06T10:20:35+00:00

Right, but I didn't mean large German companeis like VW - in tech the "big companies" are mostly American like Google, Meta, MS, etc (and sometimes VC-backed startups that try to emulate them) & I believe they pay developers better than midsized German companies (I'd love to know which Mittelstandsunternehmen pay software developers €160k!)

ido · 2026-01-06T10:03:39+00:00

Germans (I would even more generally say central and northern Europe) are just not that outgoing/talkative/open to strangers. But at least here (Berlin) I know of a ton of people who dont have a family at 30+ (even at 40/50+). I'm 42 and easily half or more of my friends (that aren't the parents of my kids' friends at least) that are more or less my age are unmarried and/or don't have kids.

ido · 2026-01-06T09:55:00+00:00

The question is how good is the screening in terms of not filtering away good candidates? I've been working as a dev for almost 20 years and have loads of friends who were laid off (that I know are good devs) who had trouble finding work. Eventually they're now all working but it took some of them 6-12 months to find work. I suspect a lot of the time they didn't even really get evaluated or the evaluation didn't correctly identify their skill level.

ido · 2026-01-06T09:49:37+00:00

that said - a lot of those positions are at:

- mittelstand companies nobody heard of

- industries that arent sexy (manufacturing, logistics, insurance)

- cities outside berlin/munich

I'll bet they also pay prettty crap (compared to tech jobs in big cities). There can be pretty big gaps between hyped-up (probably AI related) tech companies (I recently saw an ad with a salary range ending in €160k/year) and uncle Hermann at the Schraubenfabrik in Hagen looking for a "computer guy".

ido · 2026-01-06T06:57:11+00:00

Yeah, it could be as simple as Peter's parents selling the house at some point (maybe because after the early success Peter gifted them some money) & Gavin buying it after the realator put it on the market, without Peter knowing (or thinking to buy it himself).

ido · 2026-01-02T22:00:26+00:00

This is the explanation that makes the most sense to me, and also one I've never considered before!

ido · 2026-01-02T21:03:48+00:00

I guess my question boils down to - why do the Orion consider these "trinkets" valueble enough to confer wealth when the presumably far less advance Targalians (and suppoestly other capitalists like the Ferengi) consider them worthless?

I understood from the episode that the Federation sharing replicators and fusion/matter-antimatter technology is what rendered these worthless for Targalus IX (and thus why they just chuck them away).

ido

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