• 3 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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    1. It’s never going to happen. Turkiye would give us another (probably US backed) genocide in the Middle East before they let that happen.
    2. Even with proven oil reserves in those regions, the lack of access to the world’s oceans is going to hurt that country. For all of the modern advancements in the world, trade still goes by boat. Land locked countries face issues with moving goods into and out of the country, which usually adds costs and makes goods from that country less competitive. With almost certain poor relations with Turkiye, Iraq and Syria, this new country would be trying to move goods though Iran, which is just a bad plan. Or, some combination of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Russia. Again, if none of that sounds promising, it’s because it isn’t. They would be far better off to give up some land further north and try to get connected to the Mediterranean Sea.

  • Maybe, though if you think about it, the idea is basically:
    Hey, we borrowed all this money to buy up lots of companies. But rather than pay it back ourselves, we are going to put all of that debt on this one company we also bought (probably with some of that debt), because thay actually make money.

    It’s a shell game to allow Embracer to walk away with all the profits and never have to pay their investors back. If Asmodee manages to pay off the debt, that’s nice for them. Other than the fact that they will be hamstrung by servicing that debt, rather than re-investing in the company. If Asmodee folds and gets auctioned off in Chapter 7, that ends up having no material effect on the leadership of Embracer who made the decision to take on all that debt. Either way, Embracer is jettisoning all responsibility for the choices the management of Embrace made.

    This sort of leveraged debt buyout, loot the company, then jettison the debt tactic has been used over and over to destroy otherwise profitable companies in the name of short term profit for vulture capitalists.


  • I may be wrong but I figure if it’s on Fox

    Oddly enough, polling is the one area where Fox News isn’t a complete shit show. 538 has consistently rated them highly throughout the years. In this case, the poll was run by Beacon Research/Shaw & Co. 538’s pollster ratings have them at #15, with a 2.8 rating out of 3.0. While it’s proper to be skeptical of anything with the Fox name attached, this is one of those areas where you can accept the poll at face value. That said, it’s still June and polls this far out are wildly bad at predicting the final outcome. They are better as a barometer of current sentiment and may help candidates to calibrate their messaging and campaigns as we get closer to the election. Also, a 1-2 point “lead” is almost certainly within the margin of error. So, this poll is really saying “it’s a dead heat” and drawing anything more of a conclusion is more of a rorschach test than anything.





  • While Chism may be a worthless leech, he isn’t completely wrong. Valve’s ownership of Steam does put it in a privileged position, which could be abused in a lot of anti-competitive ways. The fact that it isn’t doing that is really only because GabeN isn’t the same type of leech which Chism is. He’s what a lot of people seem to want, a benevolent dictator. That said, when he finally kicks the bucket, or gets tired and sells the company, the future direction of Steam would be an open question. There may be a very good argument for Valve to be put under the microscope of the FTC for possible anti-trust breakup.


  • Java is dying in the same way that Linux is winning the desktop war, it’s always going to happen “next year” but never “this year”. I spent a lot of years as a sysadmin and while I would have been quite happy to piss on the grave of Java, we always seemed to be installing some version of the JRE (though, usually not the latest version) on systems. There is just a lot of software which is built with it. This was especially true when dealing with US FedGov systems. Developers for the USG loved Java and we had both the JRE and JDK (because why not require the Development Kit for a user install?) sprinkled about our environment like pigeon droppings.

    That said, don’t get too caught up focusing on one language. A lot of the underlying data structures and theory will transfer between languages. What you are learning now may not be what you end up working with in the future. Try to understand the logic, systems and why you are doing what you are doing, rather than getting too caught up on the specific implementation.


  • It’s down to the expected use case.
    If you have some reason to want portability, like you travel for work or expect to want to game at a place other than you home, then a laptop is likely the right choice.
    If you only expect to game at home and don’t have a need to constantly move your system around, a desktop is usually a better “bang for the buck”.

    Personally, I don’t travel and don’t have a need to move my gaming rig around. I also like having the ability to upgrade in a piecemeal fashion. So, I have a desktop. This particular PC of Theseus has been going for a decade and a half now and shows no sign of stopping.






  • I just kinda “fell” into IT. In terms of college, I hold an Associates Degree in Math/Science from a community college; so, slightly more than nothing, but only just. I was very lucky in that my father spent an insane amount of money in the early 80’s to buy a computer and then turned me loose on it. I was doing simple programming in GW-Basic by the time I was a teenager and got pretty good at making boot disks to play games. I just became that kid who “knew computers”. After leaving college, a friend of mine convinced me to put a resume in at the company he worked for. They needed a computer tech and I fit the bill. From there it was a long sequence of job hops every 3-5 years until I ended up as a sysadmin dealing with mostly Windows systems, Active Directory, Exchange and SQL. Plus, anything else which just needed someone to “figure it out”. That eventually landed me at a gig working as a sysadmin at a US FedGov site (which is why I got my CISSP). There I often worked closely with the cybersecurity team, as they would need stuff done on the domain, and I would get it done. When they had an opening on their team, they did everything short of drag me into the office to apply for that spot. I worked in cybersecurity for that site until a bit after the COVID pandemic when I got a message on LinkedIn about a “FULLY REMOTE” (yes, the message put that all in caps) position. I was curious and applied. I now work from home, reading other peoples’ email and trying to keep the network secure for a Fortune 500 company.

    The best advice I can offer is: keep learning and never be afraid to just try.
    A lot of my career is based around “oh shit, it’s broke. Here sylver_dragon, you figure it out.” I loved logic puzzles as a kid and now I basically do them for a living. I would also recommend nurturing professional relationships and don’t burn bridges you don’t need to. That friend, who got me my first IT job was also pivotal, about a decade later, in getting me to apply to a different company he worked for at the time. When I put my resume in, it passed through the hands of several different people, people whom I had worked with at that first job. Between my performance and them knowing what type of person I was, everyone one of them said, “yup, hire this guy”. Having good working relationships now can pay a lot of dividends in the future.