cowbellemoo

What if it wasn't transactional and people were just given what they needed?

What if some of what was given away to others was the food and provisions that families need?

> It’s a waste of everyone’s time and money.

Isn't incarcerating a person who's not a danger to others and who's crime had no harmful outcomes a waste of everyone's time and money?

> 6 months does not sound like the disproportionate punishment many make it out to be

I encourage you to learn about the conditions in prisons. Imprisoned persons are frequently subject to physical and sexual violence at the hands of guards and other incarcerated people. These are inhumane conditions to subject anyone to, mass murderer and copyright-infringer alike.

I'm a fan of Marx's idea that value is created by labor and the free gifts of nature.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value

Many cities had bulk mail pneumatic systems from the late 1800s into the post-WWI era, but Paris had a specific class of mail which was like a cross between a courier and a telegram served by the pneumatic system (which was big for handwritten love letters[0])

Pneumatic tubes interestingly started out as a bandwidth problem for telegraph operators. You couldn't cram enough operators and telegraph infrastructure into the stock exchange of London or Paris so the telegraph companies would have a dedicated pneumatic tube for sending paper dispatches from the stock exchange a few blocks to the telegraph headquarters, where hundreds of operators would then relay the information over wire.

IMO, pneumatic technology peaked in 1920s Berlin where at the Resi night club you could give someone presents and recreational drugs delivered via pneumatic tube directly to their table.[1]

I collected a bunch of ephemera about pneumatic tube and cash railway systems a while back. Highlights include a viscious scalping, notable passengers (cats, mice, spiders, kids, and the 3rd Duke of Buckingham), and many videos and pictures of surviving systems in operation. Here are my notes.[2]

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/1925/11/21/archives/grandson-of-bret...

[1] https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/pneumatic-tube-table-p...

[2] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FHI8AMI74jPrVXBHLjBCwz2x...

> Sweden didn't pull any lever at all

Your analysis of their passivity does not acknowledge the assumptions underlying an individualist strategy. The lever Sweden pulled was permitting the atomization of a collective public health problem.

> what did he do effectively? Cover up his involvement in Iran-Contra.

Many games go until a win condition is reached without eliminating other players in the meantime.

I picked up a TinyFPGA BX to make a VU-meter with strips of neopixels for a Halloween project (keystep+volca keytar with lots of reactive lights). You can do this with microcontrollers but I wanted to stretch myself and see if I could get a crazy-responsive 7-band meter working. I'm like 95% of the way there after several months learning verilog, testbenches, how a few modules off github work, the I2C protocol, and how to use a logic analyzer -- but I'm stuck trying to get a ADS1115 to do one-shot conversions reliably and probably have to implement the VU-meter with an arduino to get it done for Halloween. It's absolutely thrilling to be working with nanosecond-scale operations and totally parallel design though.

Awesome vco build! Have you read the MAKE book about building the Noise Toaster? It's great!

I ran into my own discouraging brick wall when trying to figure out how to fabricate metal control panels/enclosures and printing labels on them without expensive cutting equipment.

The Dollop (comedy/history podcast) did an entertaining episode about these psychopaths. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38R-OOVfz7A

This is what I've started with, too. Make: Electronics, Make: More Electronics, and the 3-volume Encyclopedia of electronic components by Charles Platt are really great.

The 8-Bit Computer video series by Ben Eater (reshared on HN recently, https://eater.net/8bit/) was the first thing I saw which ignited a passion for understanding the hardware underpinnings of computing.

ElectroBoom, GreatScott, EEVBlog, Julian Ilett, and Adafruit YouTube channels are really great, too.

The screen was on, just not private due to tempest snooping. Private strings were output using Morse flashes from HD activity LED. :)

"shibboleet" https://xkcd.com/806/

It's possible to point out that a tax is regressive without being snarky.

In DS9/Voyager, the shuttlecraft have talking computers. On occasion, they use comm badges to execute remote commands like having the computer use the shuttle's short range transporter to beam them back into the shuttle.