Friend of mine used to volunteer for the local chapter of a well-known national non-profit. He tried to explain all the technical benefits of setting up a website, yada yada. The board didn’t care and were bored.

He finally set up a small demo on his own. Just a few screens. Ran a small test. Presented static screenshots, along with charts and stats on viewership and engagements. Had mockups of donation pages, volunteer signup screens, newsletters, etc. That was when people saw the value and got interested.

Nobody cares about decentralized social networks, the technology, or how terrible the other outlets are. For a municipality, you may want to focus on maintaining multiple channels of communications and ways to reach and engage the most users. You could then fold the fediverse into it as one more channel. Something they should keep an eye on. They’ll need a way to post the same content to all those channels with the least effort. Something easy that a trained intern or clerk can do.

Guarantee there will be questions of cost of setup, maintenance, and risks. May want to have some answers and slides ready.

So Rwanda’s “very lovely gap years” are back on the menu.

In the words of the late Molly Ivins, one of the best political columnists in the U.S.: “The first rule of holes. When you’re in one, stop digging.”

Pretty cool that he reverse-engineered it and 3D printed the fixtures. Wonder if Adam Savage has any original SFX rigs.

Totally agree.

Builders care about the nuts and bolts of a building. Most people just care about whether they can get a decent hot shower, how cold it gets inside at night, or whether the smoke alarm goes off every time they fry onions.

The killer feature of decentralization, I suspect, does not lie in a singular interaction with a user, but (as Mike notes) in harnessing the power of the distributed group to do something amazing.

Makey Makey has been around forever: https://makeymakey.com/

Background: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-18303012

“She states she did not regret her actions.”

Show saved items in order they were saved, not original post date. If I come across and save something from 6 months ago, when I go back into saved items, it’s sorted way back i stead of being the first item in the sort list.

This was supposed to be fixed in a server update, but doesn’t seem to be.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/253755/gross-revenue-from-gaming-and-gambling-in-macao/

Macau, along with Hong Kong, is one of two Special Administrative Regions in China. Gambling in Macau, which was legalized in the 1850s, makes up a large portion of the region’s economy. Revenue from gaming and gambling there exceeded 29 billion U.S. dollars in 2019. To put this into perspective, gambling revenue in one of the most famous gaming centers in the world, Las Vegas, generally reaches around eight billion U.S. dollars annually. The majority of gambling revenue in Macau is generated from games of fortune, including poker, baccarat and roulette, among others.

The common benchmark ‘replacement’ ratio of birth to death is 2.1.

Once a country falls below that, they’re on a slow multi-generational train ride to extinction. There will be multiple stops along the way, where small towns get hollowed out (youngsters move to the cities), and the social safety net for the elderly goes away (not enough money coming in from fewer young, money-earning people).

Next stop is where there aren’t enough caregivers for the growing elderly population. After that, you start going down the dark alleys of Senecide, where the elderly are left out in the forest or ignored to die.

None of this is new. Japan and South Korea have been dealing with it for the past 20 years.

Only solution is immigration from high-baby to low-baby regions. But if the culture is closed and xenophobic, they’ll put barriers up to slow the flow. Second class citizen status. Sectioned-off neighborhoods. Laws to prohibit inter-racial marriage. That sort of thing. After a few years, those immigrants will trend somewhere safe and financially viable where they will get proper respect.

There will be partial stops, of course, where local nationalists will make angry noises about purity and poisoning bloods of the country, etc and win local elections (👋🏽 USA, Germany, Italy, France, and Netherlands!)

But the hard, long-term reality is: a safe, peaceful life is expensive and the cultural norms putting women down just don’t fly any more. The kids are just not making enough babies, and taking away reproductive rights just makes people angry and less likely to reproduce.

This is true for more than 50% of the countries in the world, including UK, US, and Canada. And the trendlines are pointing down.

I spent 1.5 years working on this stuff in my last job. There are tons of reports out there from WHO, IMF, and the UN, all backing all this using fun terms like ‘Demographic Time Bomb.’

tldr: We’re screwed if we don’t find a way to assimilate and encourage immigration, and reduce the cost of raising kids.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

Edit: Current government of Spain gets it: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/09/pedro-sanchez-unveils-plans-to-make-it-easier-for-migrants-to-settle-in-spain

Voyager. It’s a very near approximation of Apollo’s UI.

Guarantee someone’s going to generate a bubbly podcast of Mein Kampf or Project 2025.

Ed is getting good at lobbing these darts at hype bubbles.

The thing that this writeup ignores is that the object isn’t to show short-term revenue, but to put all competitors out of business, be the last one standing, and create a monopoly. Either that or get bought out so the investors can move on to the next thing. But at $150B valuation, only MSFT or Nvidia can afford to buy them outright.

Google, Meta, and Amazon burned through cash for years, but they eventually outran all competition and then monetized the users who had nowhere else to go.

Dangit, copy-pasta from an unrelated comment. Fixed.

“There’s always money in the banana stand.”

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UuHILqDIvis

If you use github pages, you can create, deploy, and host static websites for free. Only cost, if you want your own URL, is for a custom DNS name.

You can use their default Jekyll static rendering engine, and create the content using Markdown. And with github actions, all you need to update the content is create markdown, then push the change to the same repo. After a few minutes, the new content shows up.

https://pages.github.com/

Hugo can also be used, but it takes a few extra steps: https://gohugo.io/hosting-and-deployment/hosting-on-github/

You can also find ‘themes’ to customize the look and feel of the site, specific to the site generation tool.

If you want a lot of extra features, Docusaurus is pretty much as good as it gets, and you can set it up to push out to GH pages: https://docusaurus.io/docs/deployment

MMT: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/4/16/18251646/modern-monetary-theory-new-moment-explained

They’re just trying to learn his dance moves.

It’s reposted on HBO Max on Sundays without commercials.

I’ve caught the first two episodes. Mimics some of the British version’s games: caption competition, fill in the blanks, etc. It has more of the early Angus Deayton vibe (single host for each show). The host, Roy Wood Jr. is a comedian along with the captains, so it’s more of a 1+2 show, whereas Angus always played the straight man. Also, the whole scoring point count artifice is missing.

So far, has had some funny bits and very timely for an election year. Worth watching, IMO, as long as you don’t compare it to the current version of the British original.

Good headwind. Airplane with decent STOL. No obstacles. Balanced weight.

Brakes. Flaps full. Max throttle. Rudder center. Wait. Release brakes. V1. Vr. V2. Vy.

Bye.