Centrist, progressive, radical optimist. Geophysicist, R&D, Planetary Scientist and general nerd in Winnipeg, Canada.

troyunrau.ca (personal)

lithogen.ca (business)

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I think, once all three pages are full, new effects randomly replace existing effects. This is how it used to work before they added the extra slots.

    Assuming 18 effect slots, and a true RNG, this means they’ll have a 1/18 chance of any feature being removed for each new effect.

    Without doing the math, I’d wager this value is in the hundreds features added before all negative features are removed. But you could get very lucky and have five removed quickly.












  • Troy@lemmy.cato196@lemmy.blahaj.zoneBased torvalds
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    6 days ago

    In some countries, your religion is on your national id. See, for example, Indonesia or Thailand. Greece had it until 2005.

    In some of these cases, you could literally have government id that says “Atheist”.

    But it is largely a figure of speech. It means you not only identify with a group, but publicly identify with a ground.




  • As a huge sci fi fan, thanks for the rec. Have never read Forward.

    Yeah, I love to say: if you assume unlimited free energy, then… all sorts of cool things suddenly become realistic. But we also probably just boil the planet to a cinder (unlimited energy becomes unlimited waste heat) due to short sighted greed instead. Cause things like Bitcoin make no fucking sense on the scale of civilization, and yet how much energy do we spend on it?

    With unlimited energy someone will be like: damn, I could make a fortune harvesting all the atmospheric nitrogen and hoarding it and selling it back to the world so they can be 3% nitrogen by mass. Or some shit.


  • Strategy favourite: EU4, before mission trees were added (too railroaded now). Yes computer game. It’s asymmetric, meaning you can choose to start in stronger or weaker positions.

    Honourable mention: Go, chess, or other games with one page rules and emergent complexity.

    Strategy bleh: any of the modern points based board games that take longer to read the manual than play the game. Catan is the only one I tolerate here, as it has enough people that know the rules that you don’t need to reread it for everyone’s benefit every time. If the game needs a GM to handle the rules, you cannot know enough about the rules to form a strategy while only playing it rarely.

    Chance: Cribbage, in two player version. Well, admittedly you can still outplay the other player. But to outplay them, you need a fast and intuitive grasp of statistics. Selecting the cards for the crib is the biggest strategic advantage here, and it’s more of a weighted odds thing.

    Chance bleh: Blackjack. You have no way to affect the outcome. There is a right way to play (over a large enough number of hands), and that is it.

    Hybrid: soft spot for Texas Hold 'em. It’s a good hybrid of chance, strategy, and straight up social skills. No other game seems to rely as much on reading people, and you can do this right or wrong in dramatic fashion.

    Lastly: D&D is the best of everything. The rules are long, but the DM looks after details (or you can wing it and no is grabbing the book to check). It has the reach of Catan, meaning you aren’t learning new rules at every table. There are social elements, chance elements, tactical elements.


  • There are a lot of people who are bad at business.

    A $40 paper flower, and a $2000/mo lease. Assuming you are sole proprietor and have zero employees, and need an additional $2000/mo to live a meagre existence (food, apartment, etc.) and it takes you 15 minutes to fold each flower.

    Minimum revenue to stay afloat, 800 flowers per month. You’d need to fold for 200 hours, or approximately a 40 hour week of folding. That leaves zero time to do any marketing. So you’re relying entirely on foot traffic, or you’re marketing as overtime.

    To reach 800 sales per month with something so trivial, you’d property require a reach of at least 20,000 customer touch points per month, each who has the time to chat about paper flowers, because your conversion rate is going to be shit. If it’s passive reach, you might need to get an ad in front of half a million per month. You’d need to be a tiktok celeb or something to get this reach without adding expensive ads. And that’s a fucking gamble and a half.

    There’s no way this model works. And the fact that someone tried it isn’t something to celebrate. They possibly poured their life savings into the drain, went bankrupt, and hopefully concluded they were bad at business.

    If you want to sell paper flowers, do it as a side gig from you home. Or make them so luxurious that you can sell them at $1000 each, and rich people buy them as wedding presents – then you only need to sell four per month and can spend the rest of the time marketing.