DahGangalang

As much as I abhor Reddit, they have a lot more active communities for military related questions. I expect they'll same is true for police. I think you'll have better results asking around over there.

If you really want to go military, "there's a waiver for everything" is a common saying (source: I did a stint in the Navy), so you can probably find a doctor who's willing to write a memo telling them your fit for service. I expect the police will will have similar policies.

If this has rekindled your hope for military, feel free to DM me. Lol, I've got lots of thoughts and can point you in directions on that end (not so much the police stuff) and don't want to wall of text too hard.

Good?

If your appeal requires everyone to have less information about what really went down, then I think were better off with you not having your appeal heard, no?

Well, he took it also to mean payment in the philosophical sense. He was also fond of saying "you can pay with your wallet or you can pay with your clock". He had some extension of that to the effect of its worse when you have to pay with both, but I forget the wording (it didn't flow well).

Yeah, I had a boss once who's favorite saying was:

"You don't always get what you pay for
But you never get what you don't pay for"

Not any authoritative recommendations. I'm at most a casual user of VPNs, and so long as I see the traffic getting encrypted, don't think about it much more.

I always hear Mullvad is great for maximizing privacy. Never tried them myself though.

Personally, I use Proton. I was prepping to jump ship earlier this year, but ultimately decided it wasn't worth it. I've had a pretty decent experience with them. The only issue was on on a Linux machine...Uh....and it was minor enough and long ago enough that I don't even remember what it was?

See above for my dissatisfying experience with Surf shark.

I did try to sign up with ExpressVPN many years ago. They're payment portal was busted (tried every day for a week, emailed support with no response).

That about sums up my experience.

On the one hand, it sucks that sometimes really bad people who've done really bad things go free because of a seemingly minor technicality.

On the other, there's a set process to help keep the law fair. Miranda rights and the need to voice them to suspects when they're arrested exist because police will totally take advantage of arrestees, and because police have acted unethically towards ignorant people who don't know what rights they retain when arrested.

I'm confident Luigi didn't need a reminder of his rights when arrested, but if the cops really thought they were arresting the killer of that United Health CEO, then there's no excuse for them not bringing their A-game with how high profile it was all bound to be. It'd be really embarrassing for them if they missed that tiny detail.

Edit: spelling/grammar

Not the exact development route I wanted them to take, but def pleased they're doing something to improve existing services.

Definitely better than the whole (ongoing?) Proton Wallet ordeal.

With Proton Sheets, Proton Drive now becomes a true alternative to Google Drive.

Lol, okay Buddy, y'all still have a long way to go on that point.

Don't let me ruin your good time, but my experience with Surf shark:

Used surf shark for about 3 years around pandemic timeframe. Had no complaints (other than it drained my phone battery super fast - didn't test empirically, but seemed somewhat worse than other VPN providers). I was unemployed for a while, so took the opportunity to cut expenses; tried to drop my surf shark subscription. It was a HUGE pain in the butt. I forget the process, but iirc, you had to use their help chat to get the number for cancellations, they kept me on hold for ~10 min, then had a long winded questionnaire ("were required to ask you these questions before proceeding") asking why I was quitting, then made an offer for discounted months before letting me unsubscribe.

Its my understanding regulations have changed such that that's not allowed anymore and also that most VPN can elations are about that bad anyway, but still, wanted to share my experience. Lol, suppose so long as you never quit, you won't have to deal with all that.

Lol, suppose not.

But I'm glad at least I'm not crazy while living in this reality (though I suppose it my be less painful that way).

Oh, I was wondering why RAM prices seemed so much higher. Its been ~4 years since I looked and gaslit myself into thinking my brain was just going bad.

Glad to see I wasn't just imagining it.

Eh, gonna have to soft disagree.

Its got a lot of those same elements, but you have a character that is only at one spot at a time, and so that limits how elective you can be at the expansion part.

That said, it is also not a typical RPG where you have just a character adventuring across the land. Really unique game in that its a bridge between those two broad genres.

Its honestly a very small facet of the game, and more so used to bootstrap your company/Army's finances until you gain lordship of towns and cities (and thus collect rents).

But to try to explain how it comes together anyway:
So towns specialize in producing a single type of raw resource (grain, ore, grapes, sheep, etc) and they sell those goods mainly to a single city. A city will have 2-4 towns "feeding" it resources, and so if a city has 3 towns that bring it grain, then you'd expect the grain price to be cheaper than in a city who's towns produce ore.

Next level, if you have two neighboring towns one producing ore and one with grain, chances are there will be a stable (and relatively low) grain price in both with reasonably high population (pop growth is primarily boosted by excess food). Imagine now an enemy army rolls up and burns all the grain towns and seiges the grain city (traders can't enter a sieged city). After a week, this would lead to MUCH less grain in the ore city, thus prices spike.

So you, an enterprising new player with a dozen men and some spare horses, load up with cheap grain from somewhere else on the map and make a run to the ore city, selling grain at an inflated price.

Again, this general strat is good for bootstrapping the money to build a medium warband, but generally falls away as a viable source of income once you leave there early game.

Bonus factoids cause I've got time to kill: The game is very open ended. If you just want to be a merchant, well, I suppose no ones stopping you. But the course of action you're nudged towards is to raise a warband and join (or build) a faction and ~~conquer~~ unite all the cities under one banner.

With that, I'd define the goals/stages of the game as:

Early: building a small company big enough to be helpful to you faction when fighting alongside other lords. Goal here is to buy a few workshops inside your own faction's lands (which grant passive income).

Mid-game: you're working to build a fighting force that can solo other mid-large forces, while obtaining / managing a city or two for your kingdom (this is where you manually trading starts to not yield enough income to keep your army paid). Goal is to become a significant political player in your faction and to gain as many cities as you can for yourself.

Endgame: by this point, you should be leading a faction. For combat, you're gathering multiple vassals into large army's to take key enemy cities. You're managing the wars that spring up and determining which vassals get which cities. This is where you can finally make real territorial gains for your people.