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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • I’m a little confused on this point. I took a look at their whitepaper and it says that they’re not using blockchain at all. It’s some sort of proprietary peer to peer algorithm. Is this something that changed in implementation? I’m not really familiar with this project so I’m certainly not trying to defend anything, just unclear as to why people are calling it a blockchain project specifically.

    Edit: OK, after some more digging I see what people are talking about. The project itself isn’t blockchain based, but it’s run by a DAO that operates using a governance token, which is not exactly great.



  • What made those jobs great for the middle class wasn’t the fact that they were blue collar manufacturing jobs, it was the fact that they were unionized.

    Unions and high top tax brackets built the American middle middle class between the fourties and the eighties. Yes, offshoring allows companies to seek lower wages elsewhere, but the solution to that is not sweatshops at home. You need to start by building up strong labour rights and investing in education and infrastructure, which drive investment in job growth. Stop trying to regain all the jobs you lost and work and improving the jobs you have.

    Yes, leftists have been warning about globalisation for decades, and they’re right, but lets not pretend that what Trump is doing is even in the same continent as a solution.



  • So, all of the 40K systems follow on from the rough rules template of 2nd edition WFRP, which is a really solid foundation, albeit a bit long in the tooth by modern system design standards. There are 5 games and they all share the same basic core mechanics:

    • Dark Heresy - Small teams doing investigative work for the inquisition
    • Rogue Trader - Run a mobile heavily armed nation state doing whatever the fuck you like in space
    • Deathwatch - SPESS MEHREENS
    • Black Crusade - CHAOS SPESS MEHREENS
    • Only War - You’re guardsmen, you do war stuff.

    Only Rogue Trader ever got a 2nd edition, which made the character creation much more flexible and cleaned up some other system stuff.

    Since then, the license and mechanics have ended up in the hands of the same company that made WFRP 4th Edition, and they’ve given it more or less the same treatment. My recommendation would be to pick up Imperium Maledictum, which is basically a reworked version of Dark Heresy built around expanding out the concept from “You are acolytes working for an Inquisitor” to “You are some kind of peons working for some kind of patron”, with the details being a lot more flexible. So you could be members of the ecclesiarchy working for a powerful minister, low level assassins cult members doing hits, low level mechanicus working for a tech priest… Whatever the GM likes. You can still run Dark Heresy in this framework, but with the flexibility to do other things as well.

    It’s also a cleaner, more modern version of the system, doing away with somewhat archaic ideas like your skill with firearms being a stat just like your strength. It keeps the core ideas of the mechanics, but strips away some cruft and generally creates a cleaner feeling system. My only complaint would be that it badly needs some expansions to up the numbers of available talents (think “Feats” or “Class abilities”) as they’re kind of the core of how you build a character and right now the small pool feels quite restrictive.



  • What little I know of MtA lore is nuts. Canonically, the Technomancers (who are basically the Illuminati) faked the moon landing to convince the world that the moon (actually Arcadia, realm of the Fae) is nothing but a dead rock in space. By doing so they leveraged the power of mass unconscious belief to distort reality to actually make Arcadia nothing but a dead rock in space.


  • Actually, it’s fairly likely that the UK is getting the better end of this deal.

    First off, the UK is a net importer from the US already. So there’s no reason for Trump to even be chasing after them for a deal in the first place. This whole thing is supposed to be about wiping out the US’ trade deficits, but the US already runs a surplus with the UK. So why is this their first big “success”?

    Second, the UK have been desparately trying to write new free trade agreements since 2016 and Brexit. They’ve been trying to hammer something out with the US for years, but neither side could agree on terms.

    It’s very likely that what happened here is Trump needed a win, heard that the UK were eager to make a deal, and just told his underlings to get it done (this idiot can’t make it through a security briefing unless they break out the crayons, there’s no way he actually reads these deals), and with the sudden urgency from the White House the UK were able to get through some terms the US had previously resisted.

    Of course, it’s possible the UK got ripped here as well. Like I said, they’re badly in need of new trade partners after they fucked their sweet deal with the EU. But the fact that they haven’t signed anything with the US previously, despite the urgency, strongly suggests that what they were being offered before wasn’t good enough.






  • As someone who has run every edition of WFRP (really weird how they skipped straight to 4th from 2nd, but let’s not get into that) along with Dark Heresy and a bunch of other stuff based on the same core, this is exactly right.

    WFRP isn’t meant to be “punishing” or “difficult” or whatever other term you want to come up with for “mean to the players.” No system should ever be mean to the players by design, that’s just bad GMing. You’re here to have fun, not shit on people, and any system can be made unfair by just being unfair, that’s not an accomplishment.

    What WFRP is meant to be is tense. Success and failure rest on a knife edge. Dangerous enemies can be felled by a lucky blow, but by the same token a high level PC can be taken out by a lucky hit from a goblin with a knife. PC’s still have plot armour in the form of fate points (representing the universe itself literally looking out for you), but everything feels more dangerous, not because the game is “harder” but because death is only ever a few bad rolls away.

    High level WFRP characters will still become very powerful. A top tier fighter can duel three or four enemies at once and come out on top, and that’s OK. They should be able to do that, they’re a top tier fighter. But even when they hit that kind of power level they’ll never feel completely safe even though they’ll be able to dispatch most minor opponents with ease.



  • It’s not just that people on the left tend to be more interested in EVs, it’s that people on the far right have made hating them a fundamental tenet of their insane belief system. We’re talking about people who go out of their way to sabotage charging stations, who modify their trucks to intentionally produce more pollution. Even if you were a MAGA type and thought “Hey, that new Model S sounds pretty sweet” there is no way you’d put up with the abject hatred it would draw from your community.

    And what’s more, because of this outright hostility to their vehicles in conservative areas, Tesla has almost no infrastructure in those places. No dealerships, no charging stations. And Tesla operate their own dealerships, so they can’t just sell through existing dealers. They literally don’t have the ability to sell cars to MAGA, even if MAGA suddenly develops the inclination to buy them after all of Trump’s shilling.

    You can see this in the numbers. The most MAGA friendly Tesla vehicle, the Cybertruck, is piling up on lots. No one is buying it. Despite Tesla originally struggling to hit their production targets, they’ve actually ended up shutting down lines and retasking workers because the trickle of vehicles they produced is well in excess of demand.



  • An invasion of Greenland, or Canada, wouldn’t necessarily be unlawful.

    Remember 9/11? Remember George Bush asking Congress to approve his use of military force to hunt down the suspects?

    Well that Authorization for the Use of Military Force, unlike any prior which had clearly defined limitations, was simply against “terror” and set to expire “never.”

    One member of Congress refused to vote for this, precisely because she understood that Congress was effectively forever giving up its ability to determine when and how the President was allowed to deploy the military. She got death threats. She was right.

    All Trump has to do is “find” a terrorist threat in a country, and he’s allowed to send US troops there. Remember how he recently decided that fentanyl is a weapon of mass destruction? Yeah.