In Euro Truck Simulator 2 you start off as a driver with no truck or money, take jobs, save up, get your own truck, buy/upgrade garages, buy more trucks and hire a fleet of drivers to work for you. There is little to spend the money on, other than more garages and more trucks, which means means more employees and more money coming in. Once you get a certain amount of employees it becomes so unbalanced that money becomes pointless.

There is a config setting `g_income_factor' that affects how much jobs pay. Set it to 0.5 and all jobs pay half as much as they normally do. There are mods that set it to various values to make it more challenging. The problem with setting it to a low value is that it makes the early game too hard. It can take way too long to buy the first couple trucks and start hiring people.

So my strategy is to change `g_income_factor' as I play. I start out with it as 1 (full income) and every time I buy a new truck I change it. I set it to 0.85^(the number of trucks in my fleet) . That way the more employees I have the less each makes and the less I make from my own driving. It also introduces a trade off to hiring new drivers. Is the new driver going to be worth the reduced income from the rest of my fleet? It reverses the dynamic where in normal play the more employees you have the easier it is to get more to a dynamic where the more you have the harder it becomes to grow.

Need to vent, brag or just talk about your day? Thought this would be a nice space for this.....

What are you reading currently? Fiction or non-fiction, any genre, any language! Tell us what you're reading, and talk a bit about it.

Past weeks: Week #1 · Week #2 · Week #3 · Week #4 · Week #5 · Week #6 · Week #7 · Week #8 · Week #9 · Week #10 · Week #11 · Week #12 · Week #13 · Week #14 · Week #15 · Week #16 · Week #17

It is my understanding that if you are looking at an object falling into a black hole from a remote viewpoint, then the object will appear to take “forever” to complete the fall into the black hole. The object is effectively frozen in time at the black hole’s event horizon, from the remote viewer’s POV.

Is this the correct interpretation so far? If so, let’s remember that.

It is also my understanding that a black hole can increase in mass as it captures new objects. The mass does increase from an external viewpoint. Is this accurate?

If I understand known science on the above points, then the paradox I see here is that while the visual information is frozen in time from the external POV, the mass of the black hole does increase from the external POV. So is this where the Holographic Principle comes in? Or is there another explanation here, or am I off-base entirely?

Or is it just that the accretion disk gains mass and black holes never increase in mass from an external POV, after they are initially formed?

Is this known?

Please either attempt to answer my tortured question, or point me to material that might lead me ask a better question.

Thanks!

The recent implementation of automatic tag suggestion has inspired another idea for me.

What if Tildes could suggest related tags to the one(s) you've already chosen? You select a tag for your topic, and then Tildes suggests other tags to add to your topic, sourced from tags which have been commonly used in association with that tag you've selected.

For example:

• You tag a topic with "facebook", and Tildes suggests "social media" and "privacy" to add.

• You tag a topic with "world war ii", and Tildes suggests "history", "nazis", and "military" to add.

• You tag a topic with "avengers", and Tildes suggests "marvel" and "superheroes" to add.

The data could be obtained by monitoring the frequency of associations between various tags: if tag B is frequently used in association with tag A, then tag B would be suggested as an additional option whenever tag A is used.