Yep, here we go. Welcome, to the first entry of the UmDoisTrês aka my writer block fallback series 🫠.

1 Question

What If We Make An Online Gambling App? That Is Free but Pays Out Money?

Here in Indonesia there’s this quite worrying online gambling phenomenon. We call it Judol (judi online). It’s worrying because: 1) Most are platforms that sucks money that are not transparent at all. 2) But people are excessively addicted to it irrationally, and losing big money on it. 3) And the authority aren’t really doing anything up til now.

There are already news on people losing their savings on these apps. Hell, even committing suicide. It’s worrying. We’re a big moslem country but gambling problem is rising under our watch. It’s worrying.

Those are the problems. So I thought, how can we solve this? Then here are the part where the wild thought popped up: If these people are that addicted to it, how about we make their addictions a better addictions? Maybe while they’re addicted to playing we can make the money ‘distributed better’ to the poorer? Or maybe make an alternative gambling platform maybe that’s less dangerous? Like gambling that runs on ad-driven credits. So people aren’t supposed to deposit money, but they had to watch add to top up credits. They won’t lose money, and we got ourselves a new very targeted media platform? Ain’t it a win win?

All in all, it’s still a wild horrible thoughts because I’m a moslem and gambling is out of question for us. The solution should just be ‘eradication’. But I just can’t help it. It’s a problem, eradicating it will definitely solve it quickly. Yet maybe there’s a possibility we turn the tails for a better direction. Isn’t it interesting?

2 New Things Learnt

How Government Are Paying National Debt Out of Thin Air

This started from the curiosity of: Why when we’re talking about our big national debt, it’s our big GDP that justifies it.

So I read about this Gross Domestic Products (GDP). If I simplify it, it’s how many transactions frequencies circulated in a country. Even if its the exact same amount of money circulated around, with more transactions count, the GDP will rise.

It’s not our stack of money in bank. But why does that relates at all to our debt payback power?

Apparently higher transactions volumes and frequencies means that Gov can earn more taxes. Because there are many more tax subjects around. There is the answer. That’s where the money come from.

Imagine there is a $100 circulated in 1 transaction vs a $100 circulated in 1000 transactions, the cash being bounced around are exactly the same, but gov definitely will get more tax from the 1000 transactions. Those margins, man. They’re literally money out of thin air. But in this case the faster the air moves, the more we can get. [ WN: Wow, isn’t it like wind turbine or something? ]

That’s why a high GDP can be one aspect that somehow reflect our debt payback power.

Absurd vs Abstract

So Absurdity is when something is harder to reason because it’s illogical. But Abstracity is when something is harder to reason because it’s just hard for our brain processing power to think about.

Mathematics is abstract but not absurd because it’s very logical even though its hard to process with our head. Comedy is absurd because it’s illogical but still relatively have to be easy to process in our brain.

Both are not mutually exclusive though, let’s see what is something that’s Absurd and Abstract at the sametime..

GPT says it’s Schrodinger’s cat. Idk, I was hoping for some lighter example..

3 Interesting Online Things

1. ShadCN: It’s a pretty cool UI components library. Simple and neat and free. Will definitely use it.
2. The Road of Chelsea to 2012 Champions League Winner: The win of Chelsea FC is the thing that made me support this club (other than the signing of Hazard). But I never really know that the path to winning it is a pretty awesome story.
3. PhotoPea: This is an online Adobe Photoshop alternative. Just how people could make an alternative to an already mature application is an engineering marvel in itself. Photopea did it almost too neatly. I found myself keep coming back to this app because it just solve so many basic image processing task as good as Photoshop.