I mean, I just don’t have the expertise to say on the legal/regulatory side. Someone who has a background in securities and has been following the cryptocurrency situation would probably be in a better position.

I suppose that there will be people who do have such a background looking at it. The fact that it’s the President – who is in charge of the Executive Branch – and that most media that might be reporting on it has a partisan position makes this a lot more complicated.

Still, wouldn’t be the first time that we’ve run into high-level graft in the Executive Branch. Dealt with it then.

Axios is reporting that the soon-to-be 47th president of the United States has rolled out a “meme coin” dubbed $TRUMP, which is being billed as the “only official Trump meme.” According to Axios, $TRUMP has already accumulated a valuation of roughly $32 billion. And because the Trump Organization is keeping 80% of the coins, this means the president-elect and his businesses are roughly $25 billion richer as a result.

80%. Hmm.

https://www.axios.com/2025/01/19/trump-meme-coin-what-to-know

Reserving 80% of the new supply for the team is an awful lot. It’s usually more like 10% to 30%.

It’d be interesting to see who is buying.

I mean, yeah, one possibility is that it’s supporters getting fleeced here, which is what the article is proposing.

But I suppose, without having a lot of familiarity with the structure here, that it could also be a route to launder funds. Supposing I wanted to bribe the President to do something. If I buy this, I’m increasing the value of the asset, and most of that asset is held by Trump – that’s functionally transferring wealth to Trump’s pockets.

If I buy, say, shares in a publicly-traded company, then the SEC can see what’s going on. But I don’t think that they have direct visibility into who is purchasing coins on a coin exchange.

EDIT: Hmm. Okay, so I’m not really in the loop on this – not something that I’ve been super-interested in – but it does sound like (a) they assert that they do have that ability and (b) exchanges have not been doing so.

https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2023-102

SEC Charges Coinbase for Operating as an Unregistered Securities Exchange, Broker, and Clearing Agency Coinbase also charged for the unregistered offer and sale of securities in connection with its staking-as-a-service program.

As alleged in the SEC’s complaint, Coinbase’s failure to register has deprived investors of significant protections, including inspection by the SEC, recordkeeping requirements, and safeguards against conflicts of interest, among others.

For some reason, Warno didn’t grab me and Steel Division 2 did. That being said, I may not have given it a fair chance – I bailed out on it after a short period of time, probably because SD2 was also available at about the same time. It is true that it’s one of the few options out there with a late Cold War setting, like Wargame, so if you like that setting over WW2 – which is refreshing – it’s certainly worth looking into.

IIRC, one thing that was a little disappointing was that the unit database was a lot smaller than in Wargame: Red Dragon – I’d kind of taken that, which had been built up across multiple Wargame games, for granted.

Very much. One of the very first things they did at the outset of the war to try to delay Ukrainian aircraft from getting in the air was use ballistic missiles. In a very expensive way to do this, I recall that one of the things they did was to try to crater runways at Ukrainian airbases by dropping ballistic missiles onto them down the length of them. Had satellite footage showing a series of ballistic missile-created craters down the length of them.

kagis

It looks like Russia does have anti-runway weapons – the BetAB-500ShP is apparently one. I assume that they just couldn’t use it in that role because they couldn’t get air superiority.

EDIT: I guess I shouldn’t say that the aim was runway cratering. I remember seeing the satellite footage of the craters down a runway and discussion about use of ballistic missiles, but I guess that they could have been trying to hit aircraft placed next to the runway (that Ukraine moved or something, as there weren’t destroyed aircraft there). I think that they were probably trying to crater the runway, but I do not know that for a fact.

From the standpoint of your question, though, doesn’t really matter – either way, was still really early.

Hmm. “Strategy” is pretty broad. Most of the new stuff you have is turn-based, but you’ve got tactics stuff like X-COM and strategy stuff. If we’re including both real-time and turn-based, and both strategy and tactics…What do I enjoy? I tend to lean more towards the milsim side of strategy…

• Stellaris. Lot of stuff to do here – follows the Paradox model of a ton of DLCs with content and lots of iteration on the game. Not cheap, though. Turn-based, 4x.

• Hearts of Iron 4. Another Paradox game. I think unless someone is specifically into World War II grand strategy, I’d recommend Stellaris first, which I’d call a lot more approachable. Real time, grand strategy. I haven’t found myself playing this recently – the sheer scope can be kind of overwhelming, and unlike 4X games like Stellaris, it doesn’t “start out small” – well, not if you’re playing the US, at any rate.

• Carrier Command 2. Feels a little unfinished, but it keeps pulling me back. Really intended to be played multiplayer, but you can play single-player if you can handle the load of playing all of the roles concurrently. Real-time tactics.

• Rule the Waves 3. Lot of ship design here, fun if you’re into gun-era naval combat. Turn-based strategy (light strategy), with real-time tactics combat. Not beautiful. There is a niche of people who are super-into this.

• I agree with the other user who recommended Steel Division 2. If you’ve played Wargame: Red Dragon or earlier Eugen games, which are really designed to be played multiplayer, you know that the AI is abysmal. I generally don’t like playing multiplayer games, and persisted in playing it single-player. Steel Division 2’s AI is actually fun to play against single-player. Real-time tactics, leaning towards the MOBA genre but without heroes and themed with relatively-real-world military hardware.

• XCOM-alikes. I didn’t like XCOM 2 – it felt way too glizy for me to tolerate, too much time looking at animations, but I may have just not given it a fair chance, as I bailed out after spending only a little time with the game. I have enjoyed turn-based tactics games in the X-COM series and the genre in the past – squad-based, real-time tactics games. Problem is that I don’t know if I can recommend any of them in 2024 – all the games in that genre I’ve played are pretty long in the tooth now. Jagged Alliance 2 is fun, but very old. Silent Storm is almost as old, has destructable terrain, but feels low-budget and unpolished. There were a number of attempts to restart the Jagged Alliance series after 2 and a long delay that were not very successful; I understand that Jagged Alliance 3 is supposed to be better, but I don’t think I’ve played through it yet. Wasteland 2 and Wasteland 3 aren’t really in the same genre, are more like Fallout 1 and Fallout 2, CRPGs with turn-based tactics combat. But if you enjoy turn-based-tactics, you might also enjoy them, and Wasteland 3 isn’t that old.

• If you like real-time tactics, you might give the Close Combat series a look. I really liked the (now ancient) Close Combat 2. The balance for that game was terrible – it heavily rewarded use of keeping heavy tanks on hills – but it was an extremely popular game, and I loved playing it. There are (many) newer games in the series but they started including a strategic layer and a round timer after Close Combat 3. These improved things in the game (and if you like a strategy aspect, you might prefer that), but I just wanted to play the tactics side, and don’t feel like the later games every quite had the appeal of the earlier ones. Still, they’ve certainly had enough to make me come back and replay them.

Unciv is a free, open-source reimplementation of Civilization V. It doesn’t have all the eye candy and music and such that the series is famous for but as a result of not having it runs responsively on a phone.

Empire State Building-sized

I linked, in my other comment, to the Tunguska Event, but the WP article happens to have an image showing the Empire State Building next to the Tunguska Event impactor (as well as the Chelyabinsk one) and I just had to highlight that, because the Tunguska impactor is much smaller.

The Tunguska event was a large explosion of between 3 and 50 megatons[2] that occurred near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in Yeniseysk Governorate (now Krasnoyarsk Krai), Russia, on the morning of 30 June 1908.[1][3] The explosion over the sparsely populated East Siberian taiga flattened an estimated 80 million trees over an area of 2,150 km² (830 sq mi) of forest, and eyewitness accounts suggest up to three people may have died.

The Tunguska event is the largest impact event on Earth in recorded history, though much larger impacts occurred in prehistoric times. An explosion of this magnitude would be capable of destroying a large metropolitan area.[10] The event has been depicted in numerous works of fiction. The equivalent Torino scale rating for the impactor is 8: a certain collision with local destruction.

SOONER OR LATER, it was bound to happen. On 30 June 1908, Moscow escaped destruction by three hours and four thousand kilometres—a margin invisibly small by the standards of the universe. Again, on 12 February 1947, yet another Russian city had a still narrower escape, when the second great meteorite of the twentieth century detonated less than four hundred kilometres from Vladivostok, with an explosion rivalling that of the newly invented uranium bomb.

In those days, there was nothing that men could do to protect themselves against the last random shots in the cosmic bombardment that had once scarred the face of the Moon. The meteorites of 1908 and 1947 had struck uninhabited wilderness; but by the end of the twenty-first century, there was no region left on Earth that could be safely used for celestial target practice. The human race had spread from pole to pole. And so, inevitably…

At 09.46 GMT on the morning of 11 September, in the exceptionally beautiful summer of the year 2077, most of the inhabitants of Europe saw a dazzling fireball appear in the eastern sky. Within seconds it was brighter than the sun, and as it moved across the heavens—at first in utter silence—it left behind it a churning column of dust and smoke.

Somewhere above Austria it began to disintegrate, producing a series of concussions so violent that more than a million people had their hearing permanently damaged. They were the lucky ones.

Moving at fifty kilometres a second, a thousand tons of rock and metal impacted on the plains of northern Italy, destroying in a few flaming moments the labour of centuries. The cities of Padua and Verona were wiped from the face of the earth; and the last glories of Venice sank for ever beneath the sea as the waters of the Adriatic came—thundering landwards after the hammer-blow from space.

Six hundred thousand people died, and the total damage was more than a trillion dollars. But the loss to art, to history, to science—to the whole human race, for the rest of time—was beyond all computation. It was as if a great war had been fought and lost in a single morning; and few could draw much pleasure from the fact that, as the dust of destruction slowly settled, for months the whole world witnessed the most splendid dawns and sunsets since Krakatoa.

After the initial shock, mankind reacted with a determination and a unity that no earlier age could have shown. Such a disaster, it was realized, might not occur again for a thousand years—but it might occur tomorrow. And the next time, the consequences could be even worse.

Very well; there would be no next time.

A hundred years earlier a much poorer world, with far feebler resources, had squandered its wealth attempting to destroy weapons launched, suicidally, by mankind against itself. The effort had never been successful, but the skills acquired then had not been forgotten. Now they could be used for a far nobler purpose, and on an infinitely vaster stage. No meteorite large enough to cause catastrophe would ever again be allowed to breach the defences of Earth.

So began Project SPACEGUARD. Fifty years later—and in a way that none of its designers could ever have anticipated—it justified its existence.

That’s the opening text of Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendevous with Rama. When it was published in 1973, it was science fiction speculating about the future. Today, we’re doing it – and on a much faster schedule than Clarke had envisioned. That’s kinda cool.

https://science.nasa.gov/planetary-defense/

Planetary Defense at NASA

https://phys.org/news/2021-11-nasa-deflect-asteroid-planetary-defense.html

NASA to deflect asteroid in test of ‘planetary defense’

Not to mention that the article author apparently likes dark-on-light coloration (“light mode”), whereas I like light-on-dark (“dark mode”).

Traditionally, most computers were light-on-dark. I think it was the Mac that really shifted things to dark-on-light:

My understanding from past reading was that that change was made because of the observation that at the time, people were generally working with computer representations of paper documents. For ink economy reasons, paper documents were normally dark-on-light. Ink costs something, so normally you’d rather put ink on 5% of the page rather than 95% of the page. If you had a computer showing a light-on-dark image of a document that would be subsequently printed and be dark-on-light on paper, that’d really break the WYSIWYG paradigm emerging at the time. So word processors and the like drove that decision to move to dark-on-light:

Prior to that, a word processor might have looked something like this (WordPerfect for DOS):

Technically, I suppose it wasn’t the Mac where that “dark-on-light-following-paper” convention originated, just where it was popularized. The Apple IIgs had some kind of optional graphical environment that looked like a proto-Mac environment, though I rarely saw it used:

Update: apparently that wasn’t actually released until after the Mac. This says that that graphical desktop was released in 1985, while the original 128K Mac came out in 1984. So it’s really a dead-end side branch offshoot, rather than a predecessor.

The Mac derived from the Lisa at Apple (which never became very widespread):

And that derived from the Xerox Alto:

But for practical purposes, I think that it’s reasonably fair to say that the Mac was really what spread dark-on-light. Then Windows picked up the convention, and it was really firmly entrenched:

Prior to that, MS-DOS was normally light-on-dark (with the basic command line environment being white-on-black, though with some apps following a convention of light on blue):

Apple ProDOS, widely used on Apple computers prior to the Mac, was light-on-dark:

The same was true of other early text-based PC environments, like the Commodore 64:

Or the TRS-80:

When I used VAX/VMS, it was normally off a VT terminal that would have been light-on-dark, normally green, amber, or white on black, depending upon the terminal:

And as far as I can recall, terminals for Unix were light-on-dark.

If you go all the way back before video terminals to teleprinters, those were putting their output directly on paper, so the ink issue comes up again, and they were dark-on-light:

But I think that there’s a pretty good argument that, absent ink economy constraints, the historical preference has been to use light-on-dark on video displays.

There’s also some argument that for OLED displays – and, one assumes, any future displays, where you only light up what needs to be light, rather than the LCD approach of lighting the whole thing up and then blocking and converting to heat what you don’t want to be light – draw somewhat less power for light-on-dark. That provides some battery benefits on portable devices, though in most cases, that’s probably not a huge issue compared to eye comfort.

https://grassrootsmotorsports.com/articles/how-make-move-aftermarket-ecu/

How to make the move to an aftermarket ECU

So when ECU shopping, here are a few questions to consider about your application:

Can you use any of your existing sensors and wiring harness? Many companies offer plug-and-play options that leverage existing computer-controlled infrastructure and simply replace your computer with a more programmable one. Or will you need to run a dedicated harness and account for specific sensors that the computer needs to monitor?

Sounds like you’re in luck.