You just reminded me of the bit where they discover that fucking with causality is BAD.

I do love how the side effects (leaking improbability) were critical to the story making any plausible sense.

Throw in bistro-mathematics as an alternative star drive.

What genres are you looking in?

For building games, factorio, or satisfactory absolutely blow away anything from yesteryear. There are similar games in many genres.

It’s worth noting that some genres saturated a while back. FPS type games have been optimised to the limits for a while. It’s difficult to make something new and interesting in that environment.

It’s also worth noting that shovelware production has been industrialised, particularly in mobile gaming. Companies pump out mass numbers of games, that are basically reskins of each other. They are entirely focused on $$$ rather than making good games. They are predatory to the extreme, and water down the market further in the areas they attack.

It’s definitely a product of its time. Some of the humour has become a bit dated, but it still holds up well, as a low budget production.

That’s exactly what I do. I also have IoT devices that are still trucking along a decade later. I fully expect them to likely do a decade more.

Both Tasmota and ESPhome provide open source firmware for many IoT devices. They throw up a local API interface that other systems can talk to. Providing legacy support is as hard as using HTML put and get commands.

Just hard a read through, and there are a lot of problematic flaws in your concept.

In the first section, corruption will be a HUGE issue. The groups deciding on pay rates will have insane power, which will attract bribes etc. E.g the powerful pushing down wages in their field of interest for short/medium terms profits.

On top of that is the inefficiency problem. Very few jobs are equal. E.g. a sawmill worker, working on the outskirts of a big down will want different compensation to one working completely out in the sticks. There’s also no system to adjust for changing demand. If you’ve not got enough builders, tough shit, no pay increase to pull in talent.

Trying to cover these will create an insanely complex and problematic bureaucracy, that will grow rapidly out of control. It’s basically a version of what the USSR and communist China did. Reading up on how they failed could be enlightening to you.

On to the second point. You’ve again got massive inefficiencies. Often the blemished bananas etc don’t go to waste. They are used to make things like banana ice-cream or banana bread etc. You also jumped straight to processed foods. There is no accounting for making something better from cheaper, but higher quality ingredients.

It’s a LOT more efficient to just work out the cost of feeding a person (in a particular location). If it costs $X to feed a person for a month, then just give them each $X. They can decide how to most efficiently use that money. Some will buy basic meals, others will cook using higher quality ingredients, still others will add to it to cover take away each night. All get fed, and efficiencies get maximised on a local level.

As for taxation. It’s a good idea in principle, but would have problems in implementation. It’s already a problem that unphotogenic causes get underfunded. Your idea would be equivalent to America using “Go fund me” to cover medical costs. It works, ish, but is horribly unfair.

A better solution might be a donation match system. You pay $Y and the government diverts $Y of your taxes (up to how much you paid) to a cause of your choice. The UK government does something like it already. Gift aid allows UK tax payers to donate to a charity. The charity can then claim 25% of the amount from the government. E.g. a £100 donation becomes £125 to the charity.

Your ideas are a good leaping off point. A few useful bits of advice.

Check to see how an idea can be corrupted.

Check if it’s been done before, and how it worked/failed. Also look at how inefficient your idea is.

A large amount of inefficiency can be worse than unfairness. A split where some get $300 while others get $100 looks unfair. However, if the fix leaves everyone with $80 then the unfair version still wins overall (everything else being equal).

That would effectively create a planned economy. In theory it could work. Unfortunately, the human element cripples it. How do you rank the value of doctors against cleaners? How do you rank bananas against bread? The core elements were tried with communism, and found to fall severely short.

What has been found, in Africa, with micro loans/grants is that people are a LOT more efficient at maximising value locally than a lot of applied rules. Giving them money (e.g. to start a business) is a lot more effective than giving them resources directly. It uses capitalism to optimise on the local scale.

One of the key things with UBI is letting people and businesses sort things out on the small scale. While capitalism has massive issues, it’s VERY good at sorting this sort of problem.

My personal preference would be a closed loop tax based system. Basically, a fixed percentage of money earned (e.g. 15%) is taxed on everyone. That is then distributed on a per capita basis. There would be a cutoff point where you pay more than you receive. The big advantage is that it’s dynamic to the economy. If the economy shrinks, then UBI shrinks with it, encouraging people to work more to compensate. It provides a floor of income, letting people negotiate working conditions, without the fear of homelessness. It also channels money from the rich, where it moves slowly, to the poor, where it has a far higher velocity.

No sane UBI plan will do this. The goal is to cover Basic needs, not replace working. What it does attempt to do away with is the requirement to work yourself to the bone to barely survive. Working to pay for things more than the basics is still expected.

A useful side effect is to rebalance the power dynamics between larger companies and their employees. It’s a lot harder to abuse someone if they won’t be homeless within 3 months if they quit.

It’s often one way or the other. “Get away from me!”, or “more babies!” Pregnancy hormones do a complete number on the mother. That’s before having a parasite attached to you near 24/7, demanding your attention, day or night!

Interestingly, her pheromones can do a similar job on any males around her (both human and dog). That was an interesting surprise.

That’s a trick many/most breeds of dog can pull off. It’s amazing how well a wet nose, and a slobbery smile shoved in your face can break a bad cycle.

There’s a reason they are used as emotional support animals so often. They can guard us from ourselves almost as well as this dog did the sheep from coyotes.

It implies the trend is likely to continue. That the searched areas and the unsearched areas are nominally the same.

E.g. An inspector saying they have found 20 problems, this far, while 50% finished implies they expect to find 40ish overall.

Finding zero problems thus far implies you are not expecting to find many/any, if the trend continues.

Not quite.

Yet implies they expect to.

Thus far is more neutral, erring towards not expecting to find anything.

Proviso of this is that, globally, politicians grow a spine, along with a sense of morality, and long term planning. It would also require them to deal with the money hoarding issues with the hyper rich.

• The first step is a massive push for renewables. They should be representing 200-500% of grid demand regularly. If nuclear can get up to speed and be part of this, great, but we can’t wait on it.

• That excess power should be soaked up by large scale, portable, energy storage. Green hydrogen is the current best option, but synthetic fossil fuels could also take up the slack. Depending on the area, desalination could also be combined into this.

• We seriously decarbonise the transport networks. For vans and smaller, electric vehicles win. BYD have demonstrated that low cost electric cars are viable. For larger vehicles, where electric becomes inefficient, hydrogen is viable. This is where a lot of the excess hydrogen will be going.

• Carbon credits with teeth. Rather than relying on a planned economy mindset, we can make capitalism work for us. We need a global fixed carbon emission limit. This limit should trend towards net zero on a preset timetable. Credits are bid on, akin to stock market trades. Companies must have credits by the end of the year/period. The fine for not having credits should be a multiple of the closing credits price (10x?). The fine for falsification should be multiples of that, erring towards corporate execution levels.

This will force easy savings out of the market quickly. It will then force compulsory emitters to factor in Carbon costs.

• Combined with the carbon credits will be negative credits. If a group takes a ton of CO² out of the air, long term, they gain a new credit. They can sell this to emitters. This will provide the CO² emissions industry requires, while meeting net zero.

An example of this might be large scale bio capture on the open ocean. Grow seaweed etc on pontoons, and turn it into a solid. This can then be locked up (old coal mines?) taking carbon out permanently.

• Geo engineering. There are multiple methods of reducing incident sunlight on the earth. Everything from powders in the upper atmosphere, to mylar solar shades at the Lagrange point. They will be short term fixes, but will buy us time.

None of these require massive reductions in quality of life. They do require changes in how we do things. It’s also worth noting that I’ve not covered the numerous problems to be solved e.g. power grid upgrades to account for renewables. None of these should be insurmountable however, just engineering, or political/policing challenges.

An no, I’ve no fucking idea how to get politicians to grow a spine and do what’s required for our long term comfort/survival. Fixing the planet? That’s just a (really big) engineering problem. Fixing human nature? …Fuck knows.

Latin is used BECAUSE it is dead. It means the terms don’t drift. It also lets the names/terms be a descriptive as necessary.

Asking a doctor to memorise some Latin words is a lot easier and less error prone than a sea of acronyms.

It depends how deep they are. I run into a depressing number that have just been caught up in the misinformation storm. Getting them to stop and think often helps recalibrate their thinking.

It doesn’t help much on those that are deep enough their ego is heavily involved.

As a late diagnosed aspie, I fully get that. I also know that vaccines save a lot of lives, including fellow autistics.

The phrasing is also fun to derail the brains of people complaining about vaccines. It can bypass their mental defences and makes them think for a moment. It doesn’t work on the hard core, but the casual idiots are easier to deprogram.

Vaccines do increase autism numbers.

Most childhood vaccines are administered before symptoms of autism generally appear. A lot of children owed their lives to vaccines, and so got to develop autism, rather than dying.

If it smells like pork, you’re holding it wrong.

For nieve signal distances, that can sometimes be true. That’s not how starlink works however. It bounces the signal between satellites, each adding latency. Overall, fibre wins in almost every situation.

The bigger problem is saturation. Most things you can apply to radio waves can be applied to light in a fibre. The difference is you can have multiple fibres on the same run. This massively increases bandwidth, and so prevents congestion.

Just checked the numbers. Starlink is up at 550km. That means a minimum round trip of 1100km. In order to beat a fibre run, you are looking at over 2000km distance. Even halving that to (optimistically) account for angles, that’s still a LONG run to an initial data center.

Which one do you have, and how have you found performance? Their prices seem in the sweet spot.

The Vision AI S250 seems like an excellent option @£499