• 2 Posts
  • 69 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 26th, 2023

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  • JonCtoFactorio@lemmy.worldHow is everyone doing?
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    30 days ago

    Yeah, that’s my dilemma. I wouldn’t say I can support a stready stream of rockets with LDS and blue circuits yet.

    I have a nice ratioed 45 SPM starter build set up, but because it’s all ratioed then if I’m researching yellow science I don’t have a lot spare to go towards rocket production.

    I think I might add a few more resources without going too crazy and then head to Vulcanus. Building a proper smelting setup with foundries seems very cool.

    Will be next week before I get to that point though.


  • JonCtoFactorio@lemmy.worldHow is everyone doing?
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    30 days ago

    I’ve got all the Nauvis sciences automated as well as getting my first space platform set up. That’s sending a steady stream of space science down now.

    I’ve put in quite a few hours over the first two days, but won’t be able to play for a while now.

    Currently torn between trying to set off for another planet or scale up my Nauvis base to better support things going forward. Former seems more fun. Latter seems more sensible!






  • JonCtoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.worldTo Americans: How far apart is everything in the US?
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    2 months ago

    It’s not necessarily how far things are, it’s that you need a car to get to places in a sensible way.

    I’m a fellow Brit, but have stayed in suburban US enough to have experienced how different it is. You might have a supermarket a couple of miles away, but if you want to attempt to walk there, you’ll often be going well out of your way trying to find safe crossing points or even roads with paved sidewalks.

    Train stations are mostly used for cargo in most US cities. If you don’t have a car, you’re pretty much screwed.

    Some cities are different. NYC being the obvious one. You can get about there by public transport pretty easily in most places there. San Francisco is another city that is more doable without a car, but more difficult than NYC.

    I stayed near Orlando not too long ago and there it’s just endless surburban housing with shops and malls dotted about mostly along the sides of main roads. You definitely need a car there.




  • I was unsure about this as I read the start of the article. The territories system allays most of my concerns though. It basically puts the onus on you to go and pro-actively defeat the worm that owns the territory before expanding into it.

    If it had been the case where the worms can come and attack you wherever you are, I think that would have been a nightmare. Glad there seems to be a reasonable balance.





  • I mean, why does anything have value?

    In the strict financial sense, something is only worth what somone else is willing to pay for it. That’s the whole premise of financial trading. Getting a bit beyond ELI5 now, but most exchanges use something called a Central Limit Order Book (CLOB) to let the participants in the market see who wants to buy and sell what and for how much, and also to match those buyers and sellers. This is a good intro: https://optiver.com/explainers/orders-and-the-order-book/

    In terms of shares in companies, then they do have some fundamental value according to the market. If you buy a share in the company, you get a share of the profits (paid as dividends), which gives those shares some value. Obviously, there’s a lot of speculation too as people are involved, so emotions and wild predictions can come into play!

    Financial instruments that get traded aren’t limited to shares in companies though. There are all kind of other financial instruments that get traded every day, some are pretty basic like buying and selling different currencies. Others involve all kinds of crazy financial engineering , like the sort that caused the crash in 2008!

    Most have some fundamental value based on their attributes, so it’s a little different to the likes of an NFT. The big issues come if the values that the market has agreed upon don’t match reality, which is what happened in 2008.


  • If you strip things back, the most fundamental point of a market is to bring buyers and sellers together and to enable price discovery.

    The price of a financial instrument you see on a stock exchange or similar is simply the last traded price between a buyer and a seller. If you want to buy or sell something, then the price you get depends on who wants to sell/buy on the other side and what price they have put an order in for.

    The more trades going on in the market, the more likely it is that you will be able to buy at a price close to what you see as the last price in the market.

    If you only allow trading every hour, then you lose some of that price discovery.

    Additionally, as already mentioned, trades would likely still happen, but away from the designated marketplace. If I want to sell something, then I may just ask who else has the thing I want to sell and try to negotiate a price directly with them.

    That way, fewer trades happen in the marketplace and more trades happen in private away from there.

    That sort of limited trading does happen for some very niche products that don’t have a lot of potential buyers and sellers. For common financial instruments, have a lot of participants wanting to trade, having a centralised marketplace helps avoid the issues that would come otherwise.

    Now, you can argue that in practice it doesn’t work as well as the theory, and I would agree there. If you are a HFT, then you can make money by getting in milli or microseconds ahead of others.

    For a lot of market participants, that doesn’t really matter though. The big banks typically don’t do that sort of trading. They are buying and selling on behalf of their clients, both individuals and companies that want access to the market. The bank makes their money by charging a margin to their client (similar to how it works for pretty much any retailer), and the fact that the HFTs are making all these trades helps them with price discovery and liquidity (ensuring there is someone to buy what they want to sell, or sell what they want to buy)



  • JonCtoPeople Twitter@sh.itjust.worksBorderline criminal
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    3 months ago

    Although filling an entire trunk full of peanut butter, let’s say 500kg worth (assume a 450 litre trunk and density of 1.1 kg/l according to Google), then adding all that weight over the rear axle would affect the handling and balance of the car, potentially making it dangerous and therefore illegal to drive.

    So, it’s not actually that clear cut that it wouldn’t be illegal!