Lucky for you the wikimedia foundation files annual reports https://wikimediafoundation.org/annualreports/2022-2023-annual-report/

I think this is the latest one available.

As to whether they need your money or not I’m a bit conflicted. They have raised and spent more and more money every year. They have a lot of money and some have argued they spend it poorly.

On the whole though, besides asking for donations, they have maintained their goal of being ad free. If you’ve ever used a fan wiki for a video game or hobby you have likely experienced how bad a wiki larded down with ads can be.

I think for myself as someone that has worked as a software engineer for my entire life building out massive infrastructure that is on a similar scale to Wikipedia, I don’t really know how they justify such high development spend when the tech isn’t really evolving very much. I’m sure it’s not cheap to host, so that spend is fine by me, but I’m not sure what all they are building. That doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile, I just have a hard time imagining it.

I would encourage you to look at numbers and decide if they make sense to you. Also people have written on the subject, so some googling will likely bring you to more opinionated pieces than my own.

All six of his supporters await the news

Pico8 carts are just a special flavor of png. I would try running it directly or if it won’t run them with the png extension just rename the file from .png -> .p8 without converting and see if that works

Relevant section of the user manual

There are three ways to share carts made in PICO-8:

1. Share the .p8 or .p8.png file directly with other PICO-8 users

Type FOLDER to open the current folder in your host operating system.

Although if you are having trouble you might have more luck getting started with the built in SPLORE command

Relevant section of the user manual

This might be easier to get started with since it will all get wired up automatically for you

This is nowhere near the average price

https://gasprices.aaa.com/?state=CA

It is interesting to consider that in the vastness of space that something like a single restaurant might be viewed similarly to a glass of water in the US.

Sure the government could come in and declare eminent domain on my glass of water, but it’s value is so low as to be effectively a nonissue.

In a future where there are tons of planets and tons of replicators, perhaps the idea of personal property has just been extended to include things like a restaurant or a vineyard.

If you use the definition that private property is the private ownership over the means of production, it could be reasoned that something like Sisko’s is not necessarily a means of production but more akin to personal property. If someone on earth wants some creole food they can use any number of replicators to produce and enjoy that. Sisko’s and Picard’s vineyard might be similar to how we would look upon historical preservation. Some people could choose to spend their lives making things the old fashioned way because they enjoy it and people enjoy experiencing it.

The economy of Star Trek is interesting, but I think there are plenty of times when the utility of storytelling ends up mucking with the clarity of the message. One example I was just thinking about the other day was the introduction of the borg queen.

I get why it’s nice for there to be a borg queen, she can embody a more nuanced thinking part of the borg collective and the audience can much more readily understand the idea of a queen ruling over her subjects (whether that be like the rulers of humanity or like the queen bee as they sometimes say). But it also kind of sucks. The borg are such a fascinating species, a collective hive mind acting to attain perfection, more a force of nature than any of the other species we encounter.

While the borg queen is a compelling character and is acted wonderfully, I can’t feel a bit sad that it’s so normal and pedestrian. It turns the borg from this almost incomprehensible force into something so regular, a bunch of drones carrying out the will of the queen. While expedient to the storytelling, I like the idea of what the borg are pre-borg-queen more than what they become post-borg-queen.

I think with the economy a similar thing happens in storylines. There are many scenes that make it clear that humanity doesn’t have money anymore, but when you are telling a story and you want to have some stakes and obstacles, money is soooooo useful. Money makes it trivial to have an obstacle, or shit we need some latinum. Money makes it trivial to introduce stakes.

Star Trek had to try to thread this needle of presenting a post scarcity society while also making a dramatic engaging show for people living in a capitalist society. Scarcity is at the heart of a lot of drama, if you can just replicate your way out of every problem it’s not a very interesting show. It also leads to a thing that once you spot it’s hard not to spot, so much of the tension is aided by the “oh no we can’t replicate that” McGuffin. It plays out in a lot of episodes because otherwise every episode would be 5 minutes of “there’s an outbreak of tallarian flu on Corso V, we emailed them the recipe for the medicine and told them to replicate it.” Then the credits roll.

I think it’s a shame that when we figured out skyscrapers we didn’t start doing that with the dead. Catacombs in the sky reaching to the heavens.

I’m gonna go pay my respects to grandma she’s in the towns bonescraper. Smash cut to a giant tower made of skeletons.

Aliens come down to that kind of society, they’d want to party with us because that’s metal as fuck

I gave you 3 concrete examples of things happening right now. I put them in the context you asked for. You said I’m over pattern matching the past, which tells me you got to company towns and quit reading.

Feel free to respond but know that I’m done engaging with you. If you can’t engage in good enough faith to read what I wrote then I don’t really feel the need to humor you any longer.

Your brilliant solution is to remove zoning laws and building codes. As an engineer I can tell you those codes are written in blood, they exist because people were hurt or killed due to some home builder thinking “do I really need to ground this, I could save a 50 cents and I would really like 50 cents”

You are sitting there thinking you’ve cracked the code and if you could just get people to understand you’d win. I understand your point just fine, it’s just wrong headed.

What do you think they would do with less government? Do you think they would be benevolent titans of industry and not hurt you if it meant greater profits for them?

It’s not like we have to wonder. There is plenty of history to go read about what people like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk would do without any restraints on their power. Factory towns where workers are paid in scrip and kept in effective indentured servitude were a real thing that happened.

What magical force brings down the price of necessities when there’s less government? Look at what the free market did with respect to Amazon. Investors are happy to play the long game, they bank rolled Amazon for 9 years to compete against retailers, when the locally owned hardware store has to turn a profit to keep the lights on but the capital class says Amazon can sell hammers at a loss for 9 years, then at some point the local hardware store goes out of business. An enterprise that doesn’t need to turn a profit can out compete one that does.

Why would investors be ok with Amazon not turning a profit for 9 years? Because they knew that once they crushed the competition, they would have a bunch of people locked in, habituated to using Amazon and they could slowly decrease quality while increasing prices and make a return on that investment. They created a machine that destroyed jobs and businesses and for a while the consumer got a great deal. Subsidized high quality goods conveniently delivered to your door.

That isn’t a gift though, it’s a Trojan horse. That subsidy stops at some point and Amazon has a nearly impenetrable moat. Every year they can increase the cost of prime, increase the cost of goods, and now half the search results are some jumble of letters company that was just formed to shovel low quality goods at you.

The end result is harm to you as a consumer, a worker, and a taxpayer.

Those retail jobs are gone, instead of dozens of local business each with a workforce in every town, there can be one mega warehouse with a couple hundred people serving a huge swath of customers. This is great for amazons bottom line but if you need to work to make money to buy food and shelter, it means fewer jobs. The law of supply and demand works for the labor market just like it does anywhere else, if the demand for jobs is the same and the supply is lower then the glut of workers means employers can pay less. If there are enough unemployed people they will be willing to accept lower pay, they will be willing to accept worse working conditions, and if they aren’t there’s a hundred more unemployed people willing to take that spot. Those are direct harms to people.

Those locally owned businesses use to make up the tax bases of communities. Now instead of buying that hammer from your neighbor, you are buying a Chinese hammer from Bezos. Towns still need fire departments, police, roads, so your taxes go up because it has to come from somewhere.

Now when you go to buy a product you get whatever you get from Amazon. Enshittification is a real thing. And people can’t compete with Amazon, with their scale and their reach and their logistics. The best you can hope for is that people will try to sell through Amazon, but amazon in control of the search and there are thousands of dropshippers working to get their slice of the pie pushing quality down down down as they import cheaply made goods from alibaba and resell it to you at a mark up.

So no, the price of necessities being high is not good for me, but the government isn’t doing that. Capitalism is about the accumulation of profits to those with the capital, and more money means more ability to buy the market. There’s a reason that monopolies form in capitalist markets. Greater profits allow for greater market capture which leads to greater profits which leads to greater market capture and so on.

Competition isn’t sufficient because nothing stops people with a lot of money from going “outcompete them for a while by selling at a loss, we can do that longer than them and then we can jack up the price once our competitors exit the market.” This is exactly what investors did with Amazon.

So yes, they have the power to hurt me and you. You keep talking about less government, ok fine, what part? Which function of government would you remove that would improve the situation? What mechanism replaces that function and how does it work?

I hear your point it’s just wrong.

It’s clear that you believe the government is the bad thing here. I see you completely skipped over all my points about how their market manipulation harms the consumer and the worker. That manipulation is purely from them having a bunch of money and using it to their advantage and does not require a government boogie man.

It’s not that I can’t see the point you want to make, they corrupt the government and then the governments power is the thing that hurts me. First it’s wrong because if we were some sort of anarchy society, bezos using investor money to undersell and falsely outcompete the rest of the market until he has a stranglehold on the economy and can exact a tax on every item sold would still happen.

The fact that you don’t think high speed rail can be built, despite it existing all over the world, is just your opinion. The fact that musk has said he promoted the hyperloop in hopes of pulling funding and support from high speed rail is a thing that happened in reality

Let’s say that we took the power away from the government. Poof just like that they can’t regulate how much rat shit is in your Amazon prime food or if Elon can dump the toxic waste from his battery production in your drinking water. The harm of regulatory capture and lobbyist power just gets replaced with capitalists directly harming you. How is that better?

I’ve been so sad to see the privatization of NASA. It feels very similar to me. SpaceX celebrating about launching a rocket into low earth orbit after spending billions in taxpayer money. How is this progress? We could do it back in the 60s with the equivalent computing power you can find in a $7 wristwatch today. Why didn’t we just keep building on our success, no we had to privatize, so that we could reach a beautiful end goal where space would not be for science and exploration funded by the people with its fruits improving humanity.

No we all had to pull together so spacex can build a massive taxpayer funded toll booth and every time America would like to visit the stars some billionaires can collect their cut. And people cheer

Are you serious?

Jeff Bezos has spent millions of dollars on union busting to prevent his workers from collectively bargaining for better wages. This massive chunk of the workforce then continues to work for less than they are worth because of his illegal tactics. This creates a systemic downwards pressure on wages across the entire workforce. Investors in the capital class gave Amazon a blank check to crush retailers for decades while losing money, because they knew at some point he would have a grip on the market and could stop providing high quality goods and start pumping out cheap garbage from companies like KYZGURK and BULJCOW and reap in massive profits. The capital class destroyed the retail sector and now you get the “convenience” of every purchase making him profits while the items you buy consistently decrease in quality.

Musk admitted to pushing the hyper loop, knowing it was unworkable, to try to prevent California’s high speed rail project. There’s no bullet train I can hop on to get to LA right now because of the power he flexed.

Musk just said he would put $45m a month into a trump super pac, his wealth makes him think that he should get to decide the outcome of our election. He purchased twitter and now has control over the algorithmic feed consumed by millions of my countrymen, directly influencing their thoughts and feelings an any range of topics.

They both contribute to the government to write laws favorable to them, reducing their tax burden and increasing mine. They promote candidates that are aligned with their corporate interests and if those interests include eroding workers rights and moving negative externalities into the environment that has the water I drink, the air I breathe, and the food I eat, fuck me.

Bezos owns the Washington post and can move public opinion in whichever way he wants. If he wants people to think that net neutrality sucks, he can spend all day having the columnists churn that shit out, changing both politicians and the public’s sentiment on the topic by cherry picking data and presenting the most one sided arguments imaginable.

Yea the people with the capital have the power. Capitalism.

I’m sure after decades of capitalism they are doing fine now… right?! Oh no

Not really perfectionism just grammar

I think the fact that using a neuter pronoun is so charged that we can’t even speak or write our language correctly is insane.

I’ve written thousands of technical documents, if you are referring to a generic operator / user / whatever the correct term to use is “they.” That’s how you say “the person that I’m referring to that I don’t know anything about”

There was a brief madness in the 90s when fucking morons used “he/she” for absolutely no reason.

I think furniture assembly is more about being able to work together for a common goal and communicate what you need the other person to do and listen to what they need you to do.

For some reason a lot of people struggle to assemble ikea stuff (I honestly don’t know why, I’ve assembled dozens of items and it’s not rocket science). But there’s definitely been moments when I’ve been assembling some shelf and need my wife to assist with a two person step. If the assembly has been frustrating you have a really good test of how well can the two of you communicate through frustration and work together.

So maybe you are great at ikea assembly and don’t have the frustration factor, or you are a wonderful communicator and listener. For a lot of people though it’s that “this is the 12th step, I’m annoyed because I did the 9th step backwards and had to undo some shit, I’ve stripped this fucking screw… I’m gonna slide this piece and you need to guide it past the shelves, past them, you see how it’s hitting the fucking piece of wood, I need it not to do that!!!”

You probably shouldn’t marry everyone you can build a shelf with, but if you can’t effectively communicate when frustrated doing something trivial like building a shelf with someone you should work on that before tying the knot.

I’d consider your fear to be rational, although others might disagree.

Governments, by their nature, hold a monopoly on the “legitimate use of violence.” That’s a pretty terrible power to abuse and the best systems we have for holding power in check is to diffuse it into many people and set those people somewhat at odds with each other, aka, checks and balances.

I would consider J6 to be a failed coup, and coups are often about consolidating power into fewer and fewer hands, purging groups at odds with a strong man leader, which is fertile ground for abuse of power.

Now though you have to decide what to do with that fear. You have to decide how you want that fear to be a part of your life. Fear exists to tell us of danger, it’s our limbic system telling us to pay attention. You get to decide now if this danger is real and if living in fear is appropriate.

There are many reactions to fear, but I’ve found that positive action and mental health support are good responses to fear.

As an example, I struggle with anxiety, and it sucks because when you are anxious about something it’s common to avoid it and then you never fix it so it makes you more anxious and then you avoid it more, repeat. It took mental health support in the form of therapy and anti anxiety medicine to give me the tools I needed to start taking positive action that started tackling the things causing me anxiety. Now though, much less anxiety, the things that made me anxious weren’t helpful, it wasn’t helpful to my life to be constantly worrying about things I could address once I wasn’t constantly worrying.

Fear is a difficult emotion to live with day in and day out. Perhaps there are positive actions you can take to help address these fears, run for office, vote, volunteer for candidates you believe in. I know that therapy was helpful for me in understanding why I feel what I feel and how to make healthy choices around those feelings.

I hope you find some measure of peace though, you aren’t alone. I share your concerns, but many people do, and I’ve decided to work my hardest to prevent it since that’s all I can do. History is full of assholes trying to fuck shit up for their own benefit and decent people unfucking that shit up.

One thing to consider when you constantly feel something is “why?”

Why are you constantly afraid of the government?

Fear is our response to danger, it motivates us to take actions to protect ourselves. Fear in the presence of danger is normal, fear in the absence of danger is not a tremendously helpful emotion. The hard part now is really truly identifying why you fear the government.

Your first reaction might be to start listing grievances, the direct reason you fear the government. This could range from reasonable concerns, “they have a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence and use that monopoly to attack me physically,” to less reasonable concerns like “they are lizard people.”

I’d invite you though to try to not stop at the list of grievances and interrogate “why” you believe that grievance is real.

Consider these two examples.

I fear the government because the police beat me up. I fear being beaten up because physical violence is painful and living without physical safety is truly dangerous. My fear is likely a reasonable response.

I fear the government because they are going to join in a new world order where the satanists and the the blue-eyed people are plotting to turn us all into Babylon 5 fans by putting sriracha in the public water supply. I fear this because I’ve watched several thousand hours of YouTube videos be people that have convinced me of this plot. The people making these videos are trustworthy because… hmm… they say they are. The people making the videos make money by me watching their videos and buying their merchandise because I believe in them. I believe in them because they claim to have the only way to keep me safe from this danger I’m very afraid of. Uh oh, this fear is irrational and being fed by people that profit off me always being afraid.