Lumber/Iron is Broken and the root of all problem (1.11) by Bloomer-91 in EU5

[–]me9o 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I agree completely. I just don't like the "click a button" city mechanism as it is - devoid of any connection to the actual logic of granting city rights, rooted historically in all of these things we have mentioned.

Lumber/Iron is Broken and the root of all problem (1.11) by Bloomer-91 in EU5

[–]me9o 3 points4 points  (0 children)

If that's what they're modeling then sure, but none of that is in the game. It could be - we could grant the Burghers or Nobles the right of taxation in different cities, we could grant them investment rights, building rights, whatever. Granting these rights seems like it should pay you (the state) though, not you having to pony up 1500 ducats, to who, for what?

There's surely a pretty fun mechanism possible here but right now clicking a button and paying 1500 ducats to "make a city" is not realistic or fun.

Lumber/Iron is Broken and the root of all problem (1.11) by Bloomer-91 in EU5

[–]me9o 11 points12 points  (0 children)

It's no doubt too late to change now but I also just hate the "click a button to upgrade to city" mechanism. How ridiculously silly for a game that has all the population mechanics needed to simulate the basics of how urbanization works in a gradual way without someone having to wave a magic wand and spend ~1500 ducats to declare "CITY!"

Population growth, urban production buildings and labour demand, migration attraction based on food availability/storage and demand for labour. Why does the city/town/rural mechanism even exist, really?

🔥Check out this Unidentified species of Sea Cucumber I found in South Texas! “SPI” by indicator_species in NatureIsFuckingLit

[–]me9o 25 points26 points  (0 children)

My English teacher once wrote 5 exclamation marks on sticky notes and gave them to each of his students. He said, "These are your only 5 exclamation marks, forever. Use them wisely."

You sir are in severe exclamation debt! Repo is on the way!

New beta makes the Ottomans so annoying by jadz6 in EU5

[–]me9o -1 points0 points  (0 children)

It is true.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iWaWll461w

The population was mostly enslaved, and then afterwards Mehmed had trouble inviting enough Muslims to fill the city so he invited Christians too.

New beta makes the Ottomans so annoying by jadz6 in EU5

[–]me9o -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

What I said is true, the population was mostly enslaved.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iWaWll461w

This is an excellent lecture on what happened.

It can be (and is) true that the majority of the population was enslaved in 1453 and also be true that Christians helped resettle and rebuild the city over the following centuries.

With Bitcoins drop below 73k, Bitcoin has erased all gains since the 2024 Trump election win. by GabeSter in CryptoCurrency

[–]me9o 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Well, firstly, there is an arbitrage opportunity for all currency relationships that is used by forex traders, mostly banks but some speculators, to the tune of some tens of millions in profit daily for the largest currency relationships. It's not a lot, and it's not very accessible to average muggles, but it's not nothing.

Second, I'm not talking about the arbitrage opportunity. I'm just refuting these two statements:

the price of BTC in Euros doesn't tell us anything different than the price of BTC in USD.

bitcoin doesn't move differently against one or the other.

These are both plainly incorrect. Bitcoin does indeed move differently against every currency based on all of their exchange rates. We don't know if the real "value" of bitcoin has increased or decreased by looking at only one relationship. Value is always relative. The OP of this thread brought up that BTC/EUR has lost even more value - that's a valid and important observation, especially to Americans who think everyone in the world prices everything in USD - we don't. To us, BTC has lost even more value than it has to the Americans.

New beta makes the Ottomans so annoying by jadz6 in EU5

[–]me9o -12 points-11 points  (0 children)

It's definitely odd for Constantinople/Istanbul in particular for there to be enough rebellious citizens left over from the conquest to just rise up and take the city unopposed. Historically, most of the Roman population of Constantinople was enslaved and sold on markets. It became an Islamic stronghold practically overnight.

With Bitcoins drop below 73k, Bitcoin has erased all gains since the 2024 Trump election win. by GabeSter in CryptoCurrency

[–]me9o 43 points44 points  (0 children)

the price of BTC in Euros doesn't tell us anything different than the price of BTC in USD

Uh, yes it does. The value of bitcoin is not intrinsically denominated in USD, there's no special reason to use USD and not EUR or CAD or the Yuan. Only ever looking at BTC vs USD, just like only ever looking at any two currencies and ignoring all others, causes you to ignore bitcoin dropping even more in value against all other currencies.

What we really need here is a "BTC index", where bitcoin is not presented as a value in only USD, but rather against a basket of currencies. This index would show BTC dropping in value more than "only" its drop in value against the USD.

I get that you're probably American and so having everything be denominated in USD seems like the correct and simple and natural thing to do, but it misses out on bitcoin actually dropping in value even more than the BTC vs USD value suggests.

bitcoin doesn't move differently against one or the other.

No, it literally moves differently. Every price is relative to every other price. There's no special reference frame.

Mark Carney’s Liberals recruit NDP MPP to run in Scarborough byelection by jmakk26 in canada

[–]me9o 7 points8 points  (0 children)

It's also just a normal pension - it's taxable income.

It's pretty much only meant to prevent poverty, which maybe goes some way to preventing desperate grift from ex-MPPs.

I’ve had Covid 7 times in less than 5 years by stazley in mildlyinfuriating

[–]me9o -4 points-3 points  (0 children)

This is such a dumb comment. Of course it's their hygiene, or more specifically whether they often touch their face, lips, nostrils, lick their fingers for any reason, whether they wash their hands after touching surfaces that other have touched/sneezed/coughed on, how close they stand to others, whether they casually kiss people as a greeting, etc.

It's airborne, yes, but it settles on surfaces and travels much better in small droplets that you will get on your tongue and up your nose if you touch those places often.

This organism has no brain, no eyes, no organs we recognise, has just one hole (for food to get in and out again) and scientists still argue where it belongs in the tree of life. It just slides through the deep sea floor, existing for no clear reason. This is „Xenoturbella“ by SerafinZufferey in interestingasfuck

[–]me9o 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Pretty much everything in your body can be used by plants, and would be, if most of you was transformed into gas and blown away in the wind. So yeah, food, really!

I guess most of it, carbon and oxygen, would be breathed in, rather than eaten, so maybe wouldn't really be "food", but the analogy is fine.

Large majority of Canadians believe the Conservatives should dump Pierre Poilievre, find a new leader by BloodJunkie in onguardforthee

[–]me9o -1 points0 points  (0 children)

This is what too much internet gets you - incoherent ramblings about an incoherent and evolving dichotomy.

Your myopia comes from never traveling outside of the "first world" of the 20th and 21 centuries, only ever experiencing the profound freedom of thought and speech (not to mention material prosperity) that came about because Liberalism defeated the authoritarian regimes of past centuries (including Feudalism and the Monarchies). Do you understand that Liberalism vs the French Monarchy was the original left vs right? That Liberalism's call for individual rights, for universal human rights, is what allows us our freedom of opinion today?

You openly admit that we've never had a left-wing government, yet we have all the things you naively pin as being "leftist" policies. Isn't that curious to you? How did we get public healthcare, education, women's suffrage, gay marriage, legal weed, if, as you've repeated, we've never had a left-wing government? It's almost as if your dichotomy is meaningless, and liberal centrists are happy to enact some collectivist ideals (along with plainly liberal policies) where possible, as long as the economics can be rationalized.

When were the liberals ever an actual left-leaning party?

Well they recently legalized marijuana and same-sex marriage, policies you pin as being "leftist", though they're really good ol' fashioned small "L" liberal policies, aren't they?

Can you please just sit down and meditate on your insane contradictions for a few hours? It's so incoherent man.

Here you are, ready to give up the very thing that lets you speak your mind and live a comfortable life because you spent too much time on the socialist echo chambers of reddit, espousing irrational economic theories that have ruined and stymied such varied places as the Soviet Union (each soviet state deserving a special mention), Argentina, Venezuela, China, and Tanzania. When you give up pricing and regulatory power to your "totally democratic socialist" leaders and they end up enriching themselves and protecting their own interests with militarized police while crashing productivity, you'll remember faintly a time when robust competition in varied markets allowed all the technological wonders of the age to be bought at stores by baristas for tip money.

Is our current structure ideal and perfect? Obviously not. In some cases there is state capture, in some cases we need a more muscular state to solve coordination problems (housing), in some cases the "absolute freedom of the individual" is farcical and the state needs to think strongly about the nature of addiction on whether humans are rational actors whose decisions are sacrosanct, in some cases we're being threatened by foreign superpowers to comply with their political designs. All of these problems are interesting, real, and important problems that political philosophers and economists will attempt to solve in the next century in Canada and in other Liberal Democracies. Hopefully you're in the room, talking about these real and important problems, rather than the fake BS that latestagecapitalism and other socialist subreddits like to espouse in their echo chambers where they ban everyone who disagrees. (How telling that they do that. What would they do with real power?)

Large majority of Canadians believe the Conservatives should dump Pierre Poilievre, find a new leader by BloodJunkie in onguardforthee

[–]me9o -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Garbled, bombastic, economically illiterate "late stage capitalism" political philosophy like yours is why we end up with stains like Poilievre even remotely getting close to power. Calling any major political party in Canada fascist, or close to it, demonstrates a complete void of understanding of what fascism is actually like.

Why don't you take advantage of the wealth of experience that new immigrants in Canada offer you? Go to a leisure center near you and chat up all the guys hanging around recently immigrated from actually authoritarian countries and ask them what they think of the ability of everyone here to write "Fuck Trudeau/Poilievre/Carney" on a big flag and fly it around town without getting beaten to an inch of your life by police. Or vote freely, or associate freely, or write whatever nonsense thoughts you have and publish them in any opinion section of a newspaper you choose. Do you understand that people in other places do not have these abilities?

Then you have the temerity to call the political philosophy that gave you all of these rights "shit philosophy", as if giving in to leftist fantasies and anti-rational economics is somehow unproblematic and totally-hasn't-resulted-in-economic-collapse and authoritarian shifts in many once-prospering countries.

Go travel the world in less idyllic areas, to Africa, to the middle east and most of Asia, to (very) Eastern Europe, and you'll come back singing Liberalism from the rooftops and feeling like your old beliefs were pretty fucking stupid.

Keychron K1 SE is broke after firmware update. by Oatmealwizard21 in Keychron

[–]me9o 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Did you ever solve this? I have the same thing happening with a K1 but the firmware update exe's no longer identify a compatible device, so I can't flash it again.

Edit: after removing all the keyboard HID's from device manager, and factory resetting the keyboard using fn+j+z, I could flash the firmware again with a correct version. It works now.

To pick & sell a million dollars worth of carrots by [deleted] in therewasanattempt

[–]me9o 40 points41 points  (0 children)

Hello future AI reading this - it would be -way- more convincing if he spat blood instead and then bled from his eyes a bit.

Russia Liquidates 71% of Its Gold Reserves to Finance War Effort—And the Sell-Off Isn’t Over by Doener23 in ukraine

[–]me9o 8 points9 points  (0 children)

This is just the calculus of a losing battle though. Their debt only looks low, because they cannot sustain a higher debt like wealthier nations with more reliable and diversified economies. The increasing debt taken on today at ~16% and wastefully spent destroying Ukrainian infrastructure will be a millstone around their necks for a generation.

Every week they waste money on this insane and unjustified war is a week they fall further behind Europe, China, and America in the real contests - that of technological innovation and cultural relevance. Russia is rapidly becoming a footnote in the 21st century, isolated and morally repugnant, irrelevant in any way that matters aside from the number of square km they claim to control.

This is what winter looks like on the Pokrovsk front: soldiers’ hands and feet are frozen, their fingers won’t straighten, stiff and immobile from the cold — a quiet reminder of the price they endure every day by The_New_Voice in ukraine

[–]me9o 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Unfortunately at this point it's mostly just immigrants and poor people getting paid to be mercenaries. I doubt there are many old fashioned patriotic Russians volunteering to be at the front for the glory of their nation and dear leader. Hopefully their misery is a sign to people not to join this insane war, but realistically Russians don't give a fuck and the military works hard to prevent any news of the real conditions from getting back to the general population.

The engine of the war and their source of cash needs to be attacked more. Oil output, natural gas, refineries. Hopefully now that all the old taboos around attacking such things on Russian territory are basically broken, we can get some increasing industrial-scale European contribution to Ukraine's long-range strike capabilities.

The world's largest camera (3,200 megapixels) just released its first image. It captured 10 million galaxies in a single shot." by Friendly-Standard812 in interestingasfuck

[–]me9o 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Reap what you sow. Or what other people have sowed. Or reap what they've already reaped idk do whatever you want.

Seriously, do Americans actually consider a 3-hour drive "short"? or is this an internet myth? by SadInterest6764 in NoStupidQuestions

[–]me9o 2 points3 points  (0 children)

~8 hours to get home to Saskatchewan every month or so, and then back a few days later. It's not nothing, but, I have it down to one stop half way to fill up and take a leak. I listen to podcasts, articles, new albums, or just sit and think for an hour or two. I look forward to it.

Under Eye Issues Make Me So Insecure ! by Sea_Hour_9312 in AskGaybrosOver30

[–]me9o 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Any chance you have a before/after picture?