This is the core problem. If you want a use tax for driving, attach it to vehicle ownership (Canada does this with plate stickers, for example). If you make it specific to which roads people drive you just end up with fast roads for some and slow roads for everyone else, and a whole lot of under-utilized infrastructure capacity.

I actually read a book by a noted libertarian economist making the case for privatizing all roads (its easier to tear down a stupid argument if you start by taking it seriously).

What I expected was, y’know, just a bad argument. Like, there would be a bunch of super positive assumptions about how a bunch of stuff would work out that just don’t work in reality, that sort of thing.

What I got was quadruple decker raised glass highways with holes cut into them for rain to fall through.

No, you did not hallucinate that sentence.

That is the libertarian answer to how you solve the problems with privatizing all roads. Every road, even those in cities (especially cities) is actually four or five competing roads stacked on top of each other, owned by different companies, made of perfectly transparent glass so as not to deprive anyone living below them of their God given access to sunlight, and full of holes so as not to deprive anyone of their God given right to rain.

The author comes to this conclusion after realizing “Oh shit my libertarian homesteading fantasy doesn’t work if Jeff Bezos can just build a highway over your property, but my private roads fantasy doesn’t work if Jeff Bezos can just buy up a thin strip of land all the way around LA and then charge people a thousand dollars to cross it.”

No, Blair actually had charisma. It’s easy to forget now, but when he came in people found him genuinely charming.

Starmer is more like Gordon Brown if anything.

This is the least surprising news ever.

No one, not one single solitary person in the entire isles, actually likes Starmer. He’s a pathetic corporate ghoul who has never had a single original thought in his life. His version of Labour is just Conservative Lite, and their only redeeming value at the polls was not actually being the Conservatives.

Turns out life isn’t an MMO, and “infinite money glitches” aren’t a real thing.

Agreed. Insanely good game.

The problem is that if it appeals to a small number of people, and isn’t a dealbreaker for everyone else then it’s worth doing. In order for anything to actually change there have to be more people willing to walk away over the culture war bullshit than there are people who vote for them because of it. Otherwise it’s still a win for them.

But they’ll still vote for it anyway.

If I were locked in a room with Trump, McConnell, and a gun with two bullets, I’d shoot Trump twice so that I could bludgeon McConnell to death slowly. Amazing that people are already forgetting how badly he fucked over America and the entire world as senate leader.

Yeah, just like how the Dems swung hard to the left after losing in 2016, 2004, 2000, 1988…

Hold on, I’m being handed a note…

The fact that “plateaued” is a cause for concern is everything wrong with our global economic system. Infinite growth shouldn’t be a necessary component of stability. A plateau should be a goal to aspire to.

This game is literally perfect.

I don’t say that lightly. And I’m not saying it’s the greatest game ever made or anything like that. What I’m saying is that everything it’s trying to do, it does perfectly.

The writing is incredible. The voice performances absolutely nail it, every line read feeling like a mic drop. The art is gorgeous. The music is subtle and evocative. The design of the branching narrative is brilliant.

There’s not a single thing I can find to criticise. Slay the Princess is an absolute gem and you owe it to yourself to try it.

I don’t think the 100k thing is a legal limit. More likely it’s the platform keeping their costs down by only doing KYC on people that have decent amounts of money to invest. Either that or there’s something I’m just not aware of here, which I guess is more likely.

Basically, they’re mad that the platform has been set up (somewhat) in compliance with US law, which says you have to know who you’re dealing with when you’re making financial transactions, in order to avoid being a participant in various financial crimes, or being a way to funnel money to terrorist groups and organized crime.

This is a requirement on every company that handles the moving and exchanging of money, but the crypto world holds onto the obsessive belief that they are exempt fun this, basically just because they really want to be.

Trump, meanwhile, is basically saying “Just vote for me and I’ll make all those laws go away and you can have all the unregulated wildcat banking you want.”

Canuck more likely. In the UK it’s a national insurance number.

I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with the idea of using a GUI, especially for a non-professional who mostly just wants to get into self-hosting. Not everyone has to learn all the ins and outs of every piece of software they run. My sister is one of the least technical people in the world, and she has her own Jellyfin server. It’s not a bad thing that this stuff has become more accessible, and we should encourage that accessibility.

If, however, you intend to use these tools in a professional environment, then you definitely need to understand what’s happening under the hood and at least be comfortable working in the command line when necessary. I work with Docker professionally, and Dockge is my go to interface, but I can happily maintain any of my systems with nothing but an SSH connection when required. What I love about Dockge is that it makes this parallel approach possible. The reason I moved my organization away from Portainer is precisely because a lot of more advanced command line interactions would outright break the Portainer setup if attempted, whereas Dockge had no such problems.

The thing is, those poor design decisions have nothing to do with those features, i claim that every feature could be implemented without “holding the compose files hostage”.

Yes, this is exactly my point. I think I’ve laid out very clearly how Portainer’s shortcomings are far more than just “It’s not for your use case.”

Portainer is designed, from the ground up to trap you in an ecosystem. The choices they made aren’t because it’s necessary to do those things that way in order to be a usable Docker GUI. It’s solely because they do not want you to be able to easily move away from their platform once you’re on it.

Not the point. If you want to interact with the compose files directly through the command line they’re all squirelled away in a deep nest of folders, and Portainer throws a hissy fit when you touch them. Dockge has no such issues, it’s quite happy for you to switch back and forth between command line and GUI interaction as you see fit.

It’s both intensely frustrating whenever it comes up as an issue directly, and speaks to a problem with Portainer’s underlying philosophy.

Dockge was built as a tool to help you; it understands that it’s role is to be useful, and to get the fuck out of the way when its not being useful.

Portainer was built as a product. It wants to take over your entire environment and make you completely dependent on it. It never wants you to interact with your stacks through any other means and it gets very upset if you do.

I used Portainer for years, both in my homelab and in production environments. Trust me, I’ve tried to work around its shortcomings, but there’s no good solution to a program like Portainer other than not using it.

Please don’t use Portainer.

• It kidnaps your compose files and stores them all in its own grubby little lair
• It makes it basically impossible to interact with docker from the command line once it has its claws into your setup
• It treats console output - like error messages - as an annoyance, showing a brief snippet on the screen for 0.3 seconds before throwing the whole message in the shredder.

If you want a GUI, Dockge is fantastic. It plays nice with your existing setup, it does a much better job of actually helping out when you’ve screwed up your compose file, it converts run commands to compose files for you, and it gets the fuck out of the way when you decide to ignore it and use the command line anyway, because it respects your choices and understands that it’s here to help your workflow, not to direct your workflow.

Edit to add: A great partner for Dockge is Dozzle, which gives you a nice unified view for logs and performance data for your stacks.

I also want to note that both Dockge and Dozzle are primarily designed for homelab environments and home users. If we’re talking professional, large scale usage, especially docker swarms and the like, you really need to get comfortable with the CLI. If you absolutely must have a GUI in an environment like that, Portainer is your only option, but it’s still not one I can recommend.

Star Citizen and Squadron 42 are the games. Cloud Imperium Games (CIG) is the organization. It also operates as Roberts Space Industries (RSI) but that’s primarily a marketing arm.