When it was new it had minor charm-- the idea it was cheap and there were trillions of coins in circulation made it so penny-ante that people could have fun with it, and experiment with the tech on a tiny budget.

I played a little with it back in 2014 or so. You could buy some by interacting with a Reddit bot, and I mined a few coins on a GTX 660 (midrange gaming card for the day.

I recall sending 5000 coins to a local dogs-rescue that tried to join on the novelty, and paying for some used RAM in part with it.

By then BTC was basically unplayable without a rack of ASICs and it was already moving past the “currency” phase straight to “speculative asset”.

If you’re thinking amplifier, just grab your favourite Japanese '70s hi-fi range and go from there. Can hardly go wrong.

A half-scale Harman/Kardon 330c but with an OLED info display in the panel that held a tuning scale might kill it.

The key is to use the right materials. They sold a modern CD-based stereo a few years ago that apes the look of a small Marantz 22xx, but being plastic garbage, sort of fails the mission. Conversely, Yamaha did some new silver-face amps that don’t look like dollar-store tat.

The worst part is wasted opportunity. You had 5 years on the rest of the US EV market and a perception of having at least the best charging infrastructure. Valuable assets.

You spent 10 of those five years on a wankpanzer, FSD (Full Speed Direct-into-pedestrians), and a lorry nobody’s seen, when you should have focusing for the day you’re competing with the Electric Civic and Escalade coming down the pike.

What you should have done, while you had the tyrant’s ear, was to pull a Dodge Colt/Geo Metro. Precision-craft some legal shell game setup that lets you import competent EVs and sell them as a “domestic brand” to bypass the residual “I don’t want a Chinese car” attitudes and some tarriffs. Then you’d at least have a stream of desirable products goung forward instead of the current quirky-but-not-in-a-fun-way Tesla range.

I sort of wonder if the next generation will still romanticize Japan in quite the same way. We’re past the peak trendy-products era of Weird Sony and the Toyota MR2, anime is no longer a secret exotic thing, and it feels like if you want “15 years ahead of us optimistic techno future”, you could easily slide in Chongqing or Seoul instead of Tokyo.

Y’know what? I don’t care. Maybe it’s happening, even in the dramatic worst-case way it’s portrayed here, but is that the biggest/only story in China? It feels sort of credibility-stretching that a country of 1.4 billion people and a top-two global economy is entirely cantilevered around the idea of oppressing a tiny minority in the rural corner of the country. I’m fairly certain there are at least nine people in China who can go an entire workday without contemplating how to wipe the Uighyurs off the map. Maybe as many as twelve!

The US is no longer in any sort of moral leadership position to point fingers on human rights, if not for the last few decades, then certainly in its El Salvador phase. The only reason Western media remotely give a damn here is because they’re desperate to slap an asterisk next to the growth and real economic advancement of a country that promises to outpace them imminently.

In 2006, it was the least hot garbage choice though.

If your software supports authorize.net, you can often use some other gateways with a drop-in compatible API by changing the endpoint.

Have you tried Johnson’s Spray Crab?

There’s a huge shift in male role models over the past few decades, and it always felt to me like the people who could never fit into the old militaristic, athletic “conqueror”-style mould saying “we’ll invent our own definition of masculinity” than a direct, fully-bought-in progression.

This will leave people behind-- the ones who can’t find new “appropriate” idols or aren’t impressed by their achievements. The Linus Torvalds version of conquering the world is hardly the Genghis Khan version.

Maybe we need to find a way to broaden the modern pantheon to figures that can resonate with a traditional audience.

They’d need to change the law banning living people on coins.

Surprised they haven’t pushed to slap Reagan on the dime to displace FDR.

He’s the XKCD “one guy in Nebraska” of the leftist Fediverse.

What the hell is with the “Thank you for your attention to this matter?”

You’re shitposting to a global media audience, not politely asking Facilities to restock the vending machine with Snickers bars.

Are you just in full Business Guy Autocomplete mode? A Bigly Language Model?

XFCE’s old panel was a distinct mimic of CDE’s. I liked it…

But now CDE is open source and NsCDE gives you the same look with a highly customised fvwm config if you don’t want to stick to the Motif universe.

The UK issued silver dollars once. They were dated 1804 and considered “bank tokens” as they had less silver than their denomination required at the time. They basically stamped a new design on Spanish colonial 8-real coins and passed them as five shillings.

The UK had a hard time with coin supply for most of the 1700s until 1816 when they finally downdized many coins.

I expect the hype people to do hype, but I’m frustrated that the consumers are also being hypemen. So much of this stuff, especially at the corporate level, is FOMO rather than actually delivered value.

If it was any other expensive and likely vendor-lockin-inducing adventure, it would be behind years of careful study and down-to-the-dime estimates of cost and yield. But the same people who historically took 5 years to decide to replace an IBM Wheelwriter with a PC and a laser printer are rushing to throw AI at every problem up to and including the men’s toilet on the third floor being clogged.

It feels like we’re being delivered the sort of stuff we’d consider flim-flam if a human did it, but lapping it up bevause the machine did it.

“Sure, boss, let me write this code (wrong) or outline this article (in a way that loses key meaning)!” If you hired a human who acted like that, we’d have them on an improvement plan in days and sacked in weeks.

Stop selling it a loss.

When each ugly picture costs $1.75, and every needless summary or expansion costs 59 cents, nobody’s going to want it.

You might look into the Kailh Box switches. The click leaf adds a distinct tactile bump, plus the sound factor. The Box Navy is almost painfully tactile.

I wonder if it’s just so far outside the scope of what capitalists know to risk model that it’s not a compelling bet. The “it’s 20-50 years on” timelines are also a hard sell.

If you win by delivering a reactor, you unlock so many knock-on effects.

Does your business immediately get subsumed on national security grounds? Does a massive reshape of the energy market cut off your current gravy trains? How do you monetize “too cheap to meter”?

Researchers don’t care. They’re in it for the cool project.

Try RiscOS for a glimpse of a world most of us missed.