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Cake day: June 26th, 2023

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  • I think a municipal economic development corporation grant could be an answer.

    EDCs exist in lots of cities. The usual setup is they’re given a percentage of local sales tax, and they provide grants to businesses to move into town or start up. When the business is sucessful, they’ll end up paying back more in taxes than was given to them initially, both through direct taxes, but also by providing higher-paying jobs for residents, who will pay more in their property taxes and spend money at local businesses, bringing in more sales tax.

    The EDC could pay for the startup to provide the service locally, and then it can spread to other cities, who can either pay for it as a municipal service, or through subscriptions.









  • If legitimate means were available, the man would have been serving a life sentence instead of being gunned down in the street. Or even better, prior CEOs being jailed would have scared them into not sentencing customers to death for profit.

    Instead, the barbarism of unchecked capitalism lead us to a situation where someone getting murdered in cold blood is seen by millions as an act of heroism because we never see these monsters held to account for the harm they cause.

    Luigi and the reaction to the assassination are symptoms of a failing system on the verge of becoming terminal, and more recent developments are not encouraging.








  • I think the reason they don’t do that is because the costs of building an ad network that complies with regulatory requirements in every region is really expensive.

    For existing ad networks, it’s worth it because of the volume of customers. For Valve, the customer count would be low unless they wanted to make a play at becoming an ad network outside of Steam as well, which is not something that makes sense for them as a business. So for Valve, micro microtransactions and other forms of paid DLC are a much better business model for free-to-play games.

    I think it’s better than having ads too, but if Valve could have found a simple way to monetize the ads, I they would have gone that route. But this approach brings in more money, reduces cost of hosting games that don’t bring Valve income, and brings good will.


  • Most American cities aren’t New York.

    We have no real public transit, and many of our cities were urbanization following the invention of the automobile and are spread out to accommodate the automobile infrastructure and longer commutes.

    Houston is our third most-populous city and has a metroplex with a Combined Statistical Area of over 12,000 square miles. That makes it roughly the size of the Netherlands, with around 40% the population of the Netherlands. Soon, Houston, Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio are going to form one giant metroplex that’s 60,000 square miles.