4doorsmorewhores
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User ID: 223
4doorsmorewhores
18d ago
A few months (maybe more than a year at this point) ago someone here posted 10 Fermi-estimation type questions (maybe LLM generated?) along the lines of 1. How many cars are there in the world, 2. How many man-made satellites are current orbitting earth, etc. With the goal to guess within the correct order of magnitude, does anyone remember the post or who posted it?
4doorsmorewhores
19d ago
I of course agree that there has been a large and recent shift of midwits replacing good specific terms with bad vague terms (Space, content, partner, etc). In the spirit of pedantry many expansion packs decrease the Speedrun time for a given game (Elden Ring, others), for typical gameplay, I'm quite certain that almost all recent World of Warcraft expansions (which almost nobody calls DLC, ironically) have decreased the time it takes to reach max level and play the endgame than the original game - but I would concede that decoupling the "expansion" from the world-wide overhauls and patches that come out simultaneously are difficult to decouple.
4doorsmorewhores
19d ago
I'll cheekily play ball. If you're being this pedantic then you must also admit that the term DLC is still accurate, and furthermore some expansion packs repackage or compress the game files in such a way that actually shrinks it, I think Phantom Liberty and Blood & Wine are known for this, so the term Expansion Pack is not purely descriptive as there is compression instead of expansion. Would you insist on a different term for the few expansion/DLC sets that accomplish this paradox?
4doorsmorewhores
29d ago
I recently stumbled across this blog which touches on a lot of this in detail: https://acoup.blog/2019/06/12/new-acquisitions-how-it-wasnt-game-of-thrones-and-the-middle-ages-part-iii/ The author's conclusions are that the economic system in Westeros doesn't make any sense at all, but I'd say that is forgivable (who cares if King's landing has to support 500k hungry mouths or only 80k, just adjust the numbers), unlike the larger sin of misunderstanding how politics and kingdoms operated in a medievalish setting.
you are a king who has suddenly come into a lot of land, probably by bloody conquest. You need to extract revenue from that land in order to pay for the armies you used to conquer it, but you don’t have a pile of literate bureaucrats to collect those taxes and no easy way to get some. By handing out that land to your military retainers as fiefs (they become your vassals), you can solve a bunch of problems at once...First, you pay off your military retainers for their service...Second, by extracting certain promises (called ‘homage’) from them, you ensure that they will continue to fight for you. And third, you are partitioning your land into...chunks small enough to be administered directly
castles, something Westeros has in abundance. Castles – in the absence of castle-breaking cannon – shift power downward in this system, because they allow vassals to effectively resist their lieges. That may not manifest in open rebellion so much as a refusal to go on campaign or supply troops
Tywin Lannister wants his army, he only gets it if House Falwell, and Ferren and Foote and Clegane choose to come out and fight for him. If Tywin wants to administer the countryside, change a law, count his subjects, impose new taxes – he can only do these things if the houses under him follow through
What is unusual here is how frequently key characters deviate from the norms these societies need to function – Westerosi nobles are stunningly treacherous for people who rely on systems based in trust for survival. In a system which runs on trust and reputation, elites tend to value trust and reputation
The problem here comes in the later seasons and how they re-contextualize all of this concern. That problem has a name, and it is Cersei. Cersei breaks all of these rules...And yet it doesn’t matter. The Lannister bannermen in the penultimate episode mount the walls to fight a doomed battle for her anyway. Not only is that behavior inexplicable, it hardly seems possible. Who, after all, is raising and leading these men? Who is coordinating supplies and grain shipments to the capital? Remember, the reason for this distributed system of political leadership is that the central state does not have the administrative apparatus to raise armies or feed cities on its own – it has to outsource that to vassals.
Edit: Found it, https://www.themotte.org/post/3652/friday-fun-thread-for-march-27/425409?context=8#context
Trying this again here:
A few months (maybe more than a year at this point) ago someone here posted 10 Fermi-estimation type questions (maybe LLM generated?) along the lines of 1. How many cars are there in the world, 2. How many man-made satellites are current orbitting earth, etc. With the goal to guess within the correct order of magnitude, does anyone remember the post or who posted it?
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