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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Imo, the term “buy” for all goods should pass some sort of litmus test. Eg:

    does the product being sold have the same properties as a brick?

    • can the product be resold privately?
    • can the product be lent to another user temporarily?
    • would the product still perform its function when the manufacturer stops supporting it?
    • would the product still perform its function if the manufacturer ceased to exist.

    if the product does not pass all these tests, the customer is not buying. Consider using terms such as ‘rent’ or ‘lease’ or ‘subscription’


  • Explain what you want. It’s that easy.

    I did many years of “I want something simple that I can maintain easily, and will still look ok when I drag my ass out of bed at 10am, an hour late for work. Anything but a buzz cut”

    Eventually I found something that I can touch up at home myself, and can explain to even the shittiest of barbers.

    It’s hair. Nobody really gives a shit. You’ll get some shit ones, some good ones, a buzz cut you explicitly didn’t want. Nobody got hurt, and it grows back.






  • Why would it result in zero women playing? I’m not suggesting you merge the women’s teams with the open team.

    But have it so your women’s teams performance counts just as much as the men’s.

    Two teams (men’s and women’s), each playing against their own gender, scoring points in one league.

    No point paying your dudes millions per season to get the best players if your women’s team sucks and loses every game.

    Get teams and fans an incentive to invest and in both genders by playing for the same trophy.


  • Why does nobody watch the women’s leagues? Is it because nobody else does? can’t have all the social aspects of sports if nobody else is doing it.

    Imo, they need to stop the segregation. Ditch the women’s leagues, but keep the games and teams. Have both teams play in one league, and contribute to the overall score of the team.

    It’ll add new strategy to the seasons. Spend all of your budget on the dudes and hope they keep winning despite the ladies; build a strong women’s team to carry your b-tier men’s team; or something in between.



  • The problem occurs when house prices tumble from an influx of sales, and the 32% (In NZ) of your population that are paying their mortgage off on their primary residence are potentially plunged into negative equity on rising interest rates.

    Once you’re there, you’re kind of fucked. You can sell, but you’ll still owe the bank money, so you can’t buy/downsize. You can’t even change banks. You’re a risky customer, so you get higher interest rates. All you can do is hope the market rebounds or declare bankruptcy.

    So you’re risking fucking over 30% of your nation (and arguably the most productive segment of your country as they’re earning money to pay that mortgage), to appease a fraction of (as not every renter can/wants to buy. Eg, students, temporary immigrant workers etc) the 30% of renters that are being fucked over by high house prices.

    Not to mention, all the renters you’ve displaced into an even more competitive rental market.

    But that’s not to say the solution is to shrug your shoulders and let the landlord class continue to punch down.

    It would be expensive, but you could guarantee (current) mortgages for primary residences in cases of financial hardship. Buy mortgagees out and turn the houses into state housing, renting them back to the previous owners at fair prices.








  • I had an appointment booked at my GO. Get there 10 mins early. Everything’s normal, one other person in the waiting room.

    Other person gets called in. Still normal.

    Receptionist walks through the waiting room, locks the front door, then shuts the shutter to the reception desk. “Uh what”

    20mins pass, haven’t seen another soul. Not tooo unusual to wait 20mins.

    40mins, sunk cost fallacy sets in. Can’t leave anyway as the front door is locked.

    50 mins later, receptionist comes in “the doctor will see you now, sorry for the wait we had our weekly staff meeting”

    You fucking what. You booked me in at the time you have your fucking weekly staff meeting?!



  • I used to love ‘the cloud’. Rather, a specific slice of it.

    I worked almost exclusively on AppEngine, it was simple. You uploaded a zip of your code to appengine and it ran it at near infinite scale. They gave you a queue, a database, a volatile cache, and some other gizmos. It was so simple you’d struggle to fuck it up really.

    It was easy, it was simple, and it worked for my clients who had 10 DAU, and my clients who had 5 million DAU. Costs scaled nearly linearly, and for my hobby projects that had 0 DAU, the costs were comparable.

    Then something happened and it slowly became complicated. The rest of the GCP cloud crept in and after spending a term with a client who didn’t use “the cloud” I came back to it and had to relearn nearly everything.

    Pretty much all of the companies I’ve worked for could be run on early AppEngine. Nobody has needed anything more than it, and I’m confident the only reason they had more was because tech is like water. You need to put it in a bucket or it goes everywhere.

    Give me my AppEngine back. It allowed me to focus on my (or my clients) problems. Not the ones that come with the platform.