RenOS
6d ago
Unfortunately, the opposite effect exists as well. Normal high-functioning law-abiding citizens who technically break a law will often get it enforced on them over low-functioning criminals because it's less risky and/or an easy way to make numbers look good. And this especially happens on people whom the police is biased again in the first place, which is the entire point of anarcho-tyranny. A typical example is that honest & otherwise law-abiding illegal immigrants will often get into more trouble with the state than criminal immigrants, because the former will naively seek out directions from the state, while the latter will just actively avoid the state entirely. Independent on whether you think the former should be here, this is often a misallocation of resources & attention away from the difficult but truly important towards the easy but overall meaningless (aside from also setting up terrible incentives).
RenOS
7d ago
Despite hardly being a fan of junkie street-shitters, I wouldn't be surprised if drug-use among normally high-functioning individuals is a higher net-negative problem. SBF & co is another example in which "drug use made them increasingly unhinged & risk-prone" is a fair explanation of how they managed to paint themselves into a corner so badly.
RenOS
13d ago
I'm actually curious, what exactly is the brag here they were making?
Imagine you grow up in an conservative area where boys & man are all interested in cars, and being able to change tires is seen as the bare minimum of manliness. You're an awkward nerd that doesn't like cars but is good with computers.
20 years later, all the kids that made fun of you in school for not caring about cars are at best suburb normies and at worst still live with their parents. You went to google and now make literally 5x as much as the majority of them, while still not being able to change a tire.
It's not about the thing itself, it's about what kind of person you are. And young people pick this up as well, they see that being able to change tires is basically meaningless and anyone being proud of it is probably a loser at everything that matters, so they countersignal how bad they're at it.
RenOS
14d ago
Did you know that there is a rally point function and 'all cities build this in queue' function? Alt-click cities bar to select all cities, click what you want them to build and right click a tile for them to rally there. Once I discovered this late-game with 20-30 cities became much more enjoyable.
Yes, although I admittedly barely use it. Maybe I'm a bit too much of a perfectionist, so I tend to micromanage every city. Could be that I need to put more work into optimizing the ratio of suboptimality vs micromanaging tediousness more.
I like early game because I aim to start a war by turn 75 and conquer a civilization. Or sometimes I'm trying to grab wonders and eco up really quickly.
You still frequently click through like 30 turns with nothing happening except exploration though, and I don't like the ratio of unit speed vs tech advance in the faster modes.
City maintenance can be quite oppressive early on, when I've just conquered another civ. But I suppose it has to be to stop me snowballing incredibly quickly, taking another couple of civs. If things have investment costs to balance the rewards, that's alright. It's generally good to have more cities in 4, albeit they take time before they pay off their investment. But in 5 it's suboptimal to have more than 4 cities, as I understand it, due to Tradition's bonuses. Tall play dominates.
I think Sulla is unhappy about how V isn't so much about investment costs as fixed or proportionate costs. Cities make each tech or social policy more expensive in perpetuity, there are going to be many cities that can never pay off their science/culture debt. In addition to mere opportunity cost you get endless costs.
Maybe it changed, but Sulla in that rant is complaining about the opposite? According to him, spamming cities in 5 is always strictly optimal since happiness doesn't scale appropriately - you only need to make sure that they don't grow too much, and only have a limited number of big cities. But smaller cities are always worth it, the opposite of Civ4.
In general though, I've increasingly grown somewhat disillusioned with 4X games. Imo the real reason why empires had a limited size historically is the limitations of army movement speed and communication speed, so that past a certain distance from the capital any state was de-facto independently managed, even if officially subordinated. From there, true independence often wasn't a large step anymore, and trying to micromanage at a distance leads to so much dysfunctionality that it speeds up the process if anything. Even worse, Emperors of large empires may have a decently sized crownland that they personally manage but are really mostly wrangling a bunch of subordinates. If you don't do that appropriately, or you are just plain unlucky with a bunch of spoiled brat troublemaker heirs of your originally competent subordinates, everything falls apart fast. Happiness, upkeep etc. increasingly seem to me like extremely stupid, gamey workarounds to the problem, and as a result large empires are always either way too stable in games, or the mechanics for instability also feel random and gamey. Only CK at least attempts to simulate internal politics. But the AI isn't really there yet to consistently make games fun that force you to set up subordinates. CK is fun for a few runs until you understand the blind spots of the AI, and then it also increasingly feels silly.
RenOS
15d ago
I have a long-time running joke with my wife where I say something along the line of "she seems a bit grumpy today" seemingly referring to our daughter, then I wait for my wife to agree to follow it up with " and <daughter's name> also, I guess" (If people don't get the joke in this written form, the point is that I actually was talking about my wife in the first sentence, so I made her agree to being grumpy by being deliberatly obtuse). My wife never can decide between being furious and amused herself, and I just never grow tired of it either because both are extremely in-tune with each other (if one is grumpy, so is the other; if one is tired, so is the other, etc.) so it just fits so well all the time.
RenOS
15d ago
He's right on many things, but I'm not sure I agree with him on the penalty point. At least for me, Civ4 games always go through the same trajectory: Early game is boring( unless I play a fantasy mod where exploring is actually dangerous & interesting) because nothing much is happening. Mid game I have the best time because there is enough to do every turn but still almost every decision matters. Late game is just tedious because I'm spamming cities, buildings, units, etc. Every mouse click is on its own unimportant, but I still have to do it because collectively it matters, and without penalties it's actually mostly optimal.
Penalties, if done right, minimize this problem: Spamming isn't optimal anymore since you only want to do it if the benefits are greater than the penalties. As he points out himself, city maintenance from civ4 was a great way of limiting city spam without removing it, and what's that if not a penalty? Likewise, "I'm penalized for something good" isn't a good argument either imo; Ideally you want several different viable paths, and without penalties you end up with boring obvious plays way too often. I like when I have to make a situation-specific call for every city whether it's worth it to connect it (yet), and this decision comes up different for different cities. Without a penalty, it's just "of course I do".
RenOS
21d ago
It's not really a slur by modern understanding, though. "Germanisch" is widely used in german science as well to refer to just about everything descendant from germanic tribes.
My bigger gripe is that in german, the important "deutsch vs germanisch" distinction is very obvious linguistically, while the "german vs germanic" distinction is super awkward in english. "Deutschland/germany" is a specific country in middle europe, "germanisch/germanic" is an extremely large and diffuse group that can refer to the majority of the developed world depending on your criteria (for example, germanic languages includes the scandinavian group and english).
RenOS
22d ago
Could you share this instead as pictures or whatever? Wapo has a paywall, and the wayback machine does not include images.
RenOS
22d ago
Man, I sympathize with your struggle, I also used to have difficulties with women, but this really isn't healthy. Some nature living vacation with hard physical labor and no internet access might help you get a clear head and make you less neurotic, but risking your life is just plain stupid. I'd certainly consider it entertaining, though.
RenOS
26d ago
At first I thought the article was fine if a bit rambly. I then read some other articles from the same substack, and noticed that if I don't already agree with it anyway the rambling style was very unconvincing. Now, I tentatively dislike it; I think my initial assessment was biased by me agreeing with the conclusion beforehand.
RenOS
26d ago
"Immigrant" isn't a fungible good. There is lots of different immigrants, and they have a very blatantly different levels of desirability, but the upper middle class likes to pretend this is not the case for structural reasons. I'm not from the US, but the situation here in germany is this:
Highly educated, high functioning upper (middle) class natives (let's just simplify this to PMC, even if it's not quite the same) have almost no contact with dysfunctional lower class people. Even supermarkets and similar establishments are de-facto quite segregated by class, and even the staff there will usually be at worst high-functioning lower class or middle class. As a result, they have almost no contact with dysfunctional lower class immigrants either, and plenty of contact with high functioning immigrants. Their opinion reflects this: They're pro immigration, since it's trivial for them to ignore the bad cases it's basically 100% upside. They think that bad cases are a minority, and that anyway even those simply haven't been helped enough (because the only lower class immigrants they meet are those that made it in spite of difficulties this makes sense from their perspective).
Lower class natives, on the other hand, do not have this privilege. They can't afford to live in the same neighbourhoods as PMC natives nor do they have the same political clout, so every time there is a wave of immigration their neighbourhoods are the first stop (either the immigrants themselves find a place since it's cheap, or the political class actively puts them there). At first it's somewhat balanced, but quite quickly high-functioning immigrants leave, or technically live there but spend as little time as possible in the neighbourhood.
We actually had a somewhat similar case here lately; During the worst of the immigration wave in relation to the syrian war, we build short-term accommodation for the worst-off immigrants that couldn't find anything else. There were several planned positions, and one of them was in our university quarter (the majority weren't). Unsurprisingly (to me, at least) there was a decent amount of resistance. By your argument, there was no hypocrisy here; the university already has plenty of immigrants (at times, the majority of my colleagues were immigrants), so being against more of them is not hypocritical. By the picture on the ground, it was very blatantly hypocritical; Almost every single immigrant we have here is a PMC, usually even the child of a PMC couple. In public, university staff claimed that criminality in relation to MENA immigrants was either an outright fabrication or at most a great exaggeration, that dysfunctionality among them was likewise no problem and that in general the large boost right-wing parties got was pure bigotry & racism. But please don't put these high-functioning non-criminal diversity-enriching people in OUR neighbourhood!
RenOS
28d ago
Do you have any summary for this power struggle that happened after Yasser died? It sounds interesting, and I can't find anything that is presenting it concisely in one place after cursory googling, just bits and pieces.
RenOS
1mo ago
I've never been a fan of the word, and in particular I think the strong forms simply don't exist and are just pure insults. But if I were to offer a definition that describes a reasonable percentage of people (which nevertheless is still very negative):
At times. The 1973 Arab Oil Embargo was pretty bad!
That's literally half a century ago. To me it honestly seems like the muslim world has by now more or less accepted the Israel-Western alliance and hasn't had appetite to punish us for it in a long, long while, and the 1973 Oil Embargo (emphasis on 1973) is just evidence in favour from my PoV. I have to admit, I'm increasingly unsure how much point there is in this argument, since we seem to interpret the same evidence very differently and our intuitions and expectations about alternative worlds are our main disagreement, and I don't see how either can convince the other here, it's not like we can just run a simulation of different scenarios.
But what are the second-order impacts of this? If other countries know that we'll sacrifice them en masse for our own interests, why would they ally with us? Is Taiwan sleeping soundly, knowing they're also 'not a treaty ally but we like them' and seeing Ukraine getting turned into the Somme? We don't even recognize that they're a country! And what are the Russians going to do in retaliation? Send assistance to our other enemies? Stir up trouble? Coup various nations in Africa? Once the war is over, a lot of Russians are going to remain very angry with us for getting their countrymen killed with our weapons. Putin will likely be replaced with a real hardliner when he dies.
I don't think Ukraine losing completely is a foregone conclusion, I was pointing out that even granting your assumptions the current war is better for us than the alternative where Ukraine gets curbstomped and de-facto incorporated because we do nothing. Likewise "I'd rather die than be drafted into the Russian Army" is a rather common sentiment for Ukrainians. I don't trust Russian stats either, there is endless stories on their side as well about questionable draftings. We can also prop up Ukraine economically more or less indefinitely, Russia has no such backing. The counteroffensive was too optimistic and much more manpower-intensive than Ukraine can afford, but I think Ukraine has still a decent chance to grind everything into a stalemate. On the issue of retaliation, I have absolutely no confidence in Putin not doing those things anyway. Again, I see a bigger chance in trying to drain him of resources than in just hoping that if we give him Ukraine on a silver plate he'll be nice.
Given that we spent the last few years building up the Ukrainian military, it would be embarrassing to give up on them. But it would be far more embarrassing to lose if we make a major effort, which we have now made. It's the difference between looking impotent and proclaiming one's impotence to the whole world. Ideally, we should've done nothing to start with, then there would be no risk of looking weak, since we never declared an interest in Ukraine. Russia demolishing Georgia didn't make us look weak, we never really tried to strengthen Georgia militarily. But now that we've pursued this loathsome path, it is hard to leave. It becomes more and more tempting to keep doubling down in a desperate hope for victory. Likewise, the Russians will keep intensifying their efforts. They've spent significant amounts of blood on this, they are becoming less and less willing to give up, their demands will increase.
Nope, it just doesn't work. Georgia is far away enough and small enough that even most Europeans genuinely don't care about it, but Ukraine is literally next door for pretty much the entire Eastern Europe, and even for Germans it's uncomfortably close to home. For us, Georgia is a "I didn't even know it's technically Europe" country, Ukraine is a "my grandma's carer is from there and I've always liked her" country. I'm pretty sure Scandinavians, especially Finns, would also care no matter what. It's mostly southwest Europe + France + UK that could possibly not care. Even if the US had never supported Ukraine, large parts of Europe would at the very least rage impotently and probably try to send aid (and remember the occasion). In your alternative world, the west would look impotent and divided, more than in this world. Even worse, it gives Europeans yet another excuse to just not help out if Taiwan ever should get attacked and try to strike a deal with China instead.
When I heard this, the first thing that came to mind is how unfun woman soccer is. Especially if I grant the critics that, yes, non-consensually kissing a woman in such a situation is a Big Deal.
You could have literally have the same situation in men soccer, with a significantly bigger and stronger, literally gay coach kissing a male player on the mouth in a moment of excitement, the receiving player looking baffled & awkward at first but laughing after realizing what happened. It would be the kind of thing that everyone considers HILARIOUS, that would be remembered positively for a long time as showing just how emotionally invested everyone was in this win. In fact, in male soccer people constantly do stupid shit to celebrate winning, often things that in any other situation would be considered kinda gay. I'm not a particular fan of soccer in general, but I can sympathize with the kind of excitement you may generate when winning something as big as a world cup. Also, as some people have already pointed out, kissing is one of those things that varies A LOT by culture. In some it's not a big deal, even among acquaintances, in others it's strictly for lovers. I've been surprised at times by kisses from southern european girls (and had to remind myself afterwards that it wasn't a big deal, despite what my cultural instincts were screaming at me).
I also don't quite know how to fix this. I can see where people are coming from, woman genuinely are often more susceptible to being pressured into uncomfortable sexual situations and so a sense of protectiveness is not misplaced. Likewise men are genuinely biased towards doing something ambiguously sexual and then go for a mediocre justification if it doesn't work out. The current trajectory is pointing towards boring adjustment, where even in exciting situations people consciously suppress their emotions and play it cool, which we already do in most other, especially work, situations. But I think that takes out a lot of the fun of sports, it's one of the few areas where genuine, strong emotions like this are still acceptable.
RenOS
1mo ago
Like what? Sure, there are often disputes between countries. Yet they have oil that the West needs. We have technology they need. There are good reasons for us to get along. But if we are totally committed to supporting a state that's hated by the Arab population, that will make allying with Arab states much more complicated and risky.
And we're still getting the oil even in this world where we aid Israel. As you said there's plenty of disputes, do you want me to supply a list? There's plenty of conflicts around (not) punishing blasphemy against The Prophet, around housing "terrorists", some other land disputes... As a counter-example France vs Germany paper over their serious disputes for the most part and many of them have been de-facto forgotten, because they have free movement between them, share most values nowadays anyway and overall cooperate on many issues. On the other hand it's the anti-west hardliners that dictate the tone in the middle east because their culture is already slanted that way and the large value difference causes a lack of sympathy. There is always two different effects to letting a any power do what it wants; On one side, if there's mutual sympathy they may be grateful. On the other side, without mutual sympathy they will interpret the lack of resistance as weakness. With the middle eastern powers I have much less confidence in the first than the latter.
They're being blown to smithereens. Ukraine has already taken WW1-tier numbers of amputations, their casualties and death toll must be horrific, contra the rosy casualty reports from Western intelligence and media. After lying through Iraq and Afghanistan, I don't trust these people if they say things are going well. Ukraine infamously tried to draft a man with no hands six months back: https://www.economist.com/europe/2023/02/26/ukraine-finds-stepping-up-mobilisation-is-not-so-easy. You can see many videos of men running from draft officials, being dragged into cars. This is an army desperate for more manpower - presumably much of it has already been lost. We'll look weak and foolish once they lose. We'll be sending the message to China that if there are temporary reverses at the start of the war, all you need to do is buckle down, mobilize more men and fight on to victory.
Yes_chad.jpg. What did you expect of the war? After a takeover any able-bodied Ukraine is a potential russian conscript. At the risk of sounding maximally cynical, if we consider Ukraine losing a foregone conclusion, we ideally want to take in as many Ukrainian refugees as possible, and otherwise maximum casualties on both sides. In terms of the ammo and other military resources we send them, I don't think they're as valuable to us as you make them out to be; The west is mainly inhibited by a lack of will when it comes to war, not resources or economy. If we want to create them faster, we have a lot of slack to build up the respective industry. On the other hand, Russia is constrained in terms of economy, and they're also burning through a lot of resources (just as manpower). In addition, the war has greatly increased the willingness of Europe in particular to fight. Even left-leaning former pacifists I know are talking about how we need to spend more on the military nowadays, it's nuts. And this is Germany. If Russia starts to make serious gains again I wouldn't be surprised if Ukraine's direct neighbours, especially Poland, would start to send their own army after all, independent of what the rest of the west wants. Russia may win the Ukraine war after a drawn-out conflict, but they will have lost a lot of manpower and military stockpiles in the process while Europe will be in an increased state of military readiness.
Just think about the alternative: Since we send no aid, Ukraine crumbles relatively fast. Any attempts at guerilla warfare or resistance is met with the punishment of Ukrainian civilians. The Ukrainian military gets absorbed into the Russian military. Russia itself has minimal losses in terms of manpower and military stockpiles compared to our world. Europe has almost no time to build up any military and, due to the way propaganda works, the willingness to build the military up will be much lower. How is that world better than ours? If I were in Putin's - or Xi's - shoes, I'd see that as a clear sign that the west is weak and would immediately try to see how much more I can get away with.
RenOS
1mo ago
Why do they hate us? Why does anti-Western Islamism exist (and before that anti-Western pan-Arabism)? Why did Egypt and Syria and Iraq all move to favour the Soviet Union? Why does Iran hate us? In a nutshell - Israel.
I think you're being very naive here, and also with Ukraine. I'm hardly a hardliner on both issues - back during Maidan time I was actually in favour of the russian territories getting their independence referendum, and I currently work together with different muslim researchers that work in arabic universities. I can see the value of working with people even if they have very different values. But the arabic world has been opposed to the west for a long time now. The alliance with the soviets was purely out of convenience and correspondingly never very stable. The Israeli issue might be the most legible complaint they can give us, but I'm quite confident that if we had given up on the Israelis we'd have different things we'd be fighting over with them. Likewise, they can take our aid and weapons and then abandon us if it suits them just fine, and in terms of their own worldview they'd be perfectly justified in doing so. The same goes for Russia, there was a time where there was a decent chance they may switch to the western side, but I don't see such a chance with the current leadership anymore.
There are a whole host of differences here, like said annexations happening within living memory (Golan Heights for example), a large population of forcibly displaced Mexicans wanting to go back to New Mexico and the fact that there's no European union of states. Europe and North America aren't even on the same continent as Israel, it's a different region entirely. Mexico also isn't the world's largest oil producer. New Mexico in this case, I assume, is not a nuclear power.
The key here is how people identify their teams. Most people nowadays consider themselves something like "Team Western World", which spans the globe and so to them being on different continents is not a reason to not send (military) aid. You, from what I can gather, consider yourself primarily "Team America", so I gave an example that applies directly to America, to get you in a similar headspace as the average Israel supporter. It's not about the example being perfectly comparable - it never is - , the purpose is to understand how others think about an issue due to their values differences. If you want, you may imagine many displaced Mexicans - with the average values as other Mexicans - wanting to live in New Mexico for the purpose of the example, and similar.
Precisely. It's foolish to ally with weak countries that have little marginal value, angering strong countries in the process. The economic consequences of our Ukraine initiative is already hitting Europe hard. Strength should be conserved and wielded where it's most needed, which is clearly Asia. Angering Russia by getting involved in Ukraine opens up a second front, gives China a useful, resource-rich ally and worsens our position overall.
Imo, depending on Russia in terms of energy was foolish long before the Ukraine, and having to look for other options was overdue. I'd surely have preferred if we had followed your tag line and build enough nuclear plants to be independent before the conflict, though. Likewise arming Ukraine is actually a reasonably cheap way of bleeding Russia, and the basic logic of geopolitics dictates, independent of Ukraine, that Russia had to align itself with China if it has any aspirations of defending against westernization and being a superpower. If we were to give up on Ukraine, they could just take it ... and ally with China anyway. In the invasion of Ukraine, Russia has actually shown remarkable weakness (and/or Ukraine has shown remarkable strength). It is reasonable to conclude that this is a good point to invest resources to strengthen your position.
RenOS
1mo ago
Why on earth would any sane, unbiased strategic thinker choose to ally with Israel over the Arabs? The US wouldn't have any enemies in the Arab world if it weren't for Israel, that's by far the biggest problem with US-MENA relations.
Israel is the only country in the region that is even remotely sharing western values. Especially if you view politics as a fight between worldviews, you're essentially asking "why aren't we fucking over our own team to instead make deals with enemies that hate us, our views, and only work with us because they can't beat us?" You can certainly view everything in more narrow teams, but most people nowadays think in very large, globe spanning teams, and Israel is then part of "our" team already, whether we support them or not. It might still end up not worth it, but it's not as easy as you make it out to be. Especially assuming they need our help to not get swallowed by the arabs you may think about it in terms of the following thought experiment to understand the people who favor the alliance with Israel:
Imagine a much less centralized US that is more like a european union of states and that Mexico moved in a very different direction in terms of religion and values (say that they still follow some kind of central american religion, maybe not outright human sacrifices but incompatible with modern values to the same degree that conservative arabic Islam is), and is still hostile about the annexed territories and, in particular, about New Mexico. They are willing to work with the greater US in a limited capacity, but there's frequent costly border skirmishes and threats of war. New Mexico itself has a significant minority of mexican-identifying people that want to become independent/join Mexico, and the state in general is somewhat irrelevant and can't protect itself. You're in a far northern state and there is no chance whatsoever that you're at a direct threat from Mexico, and the US as a whole is clearly superior to Mexico in terms of military. Somebody comes along and asks you why the hell are you allying New Mexico when you can just abandon them and ally with Mexico instead? It's just a much better ally in any category you can imagine!
Also, you're argument pretty closely applies to Ukraine, as well.
I'm sure you'll find some ways how this example is different from the Israeli example, but this is - I think - quite close to how supporters of Israel view the situation.
RenOS
1mo ago
You can also have "casing" components that you'd need to destroy to expose something beneath them, I saw a few mods doing it. The more I think about it, the more I like the idea. I really like the idea of fighters/bombers doing subsystem strikes to take out a specific advantage the enemy might have. I did also have concerns that this tactic might be overpowered. In vanilla FS2 they get around it by most subsystems, except engines, not really doing anything unless explicitly scripted. It makes sense because if taking out the weapons subsystem of a capital ship actually took out all it's weapons, they would be way too easy to defeat. You can compensate by giving subsystems a lot of health, but adding a casing would make it a look more interesting, since you can see it get blown off. Hopefully you can also give the casing a different type of health than the actual subsystem, so you'd need to use anti-armor weapons to blow it off, and then anti-subsystem weapons to actually disable the system.
I played the BattleTech video game quite a lot, it has a very similar system, and it indeed has a bit of a problem with component targeting being overpowered. One way to balance it a bit is to not have general "weapon subsystem", which is indeed stupid design, but to have each specific weapon be it's own component, so that even if the opponent has shot some weapons to pieces, other weapons function just fine. Likewise there isn't a single "cooling subsystem" there are multiple "cooling components" located throughout the ship. Another is to give components some redundancy so that they are still somewhat functional even if significantly damaged. Casing/Armor for each component should also be present, I agree, and in general each component needs a surprisingly high amount of health/armor compared to the general hull points to make anything but component targeting viable (or you need to make component targeting very difficult).
I don't entirely get this. At least here in germany, it's pretty common to care about second/third or local leagues if the favorite team isn't good enough for the first, and it's also pretty common for people to have a favorite team that doesn't really make much sense geographically(I grew up in northwest germany and rooting for Bayern München wasn't unusual there). Pro/Rel generally also allows for a very smooth transition between amateur and professional teams, which is a good way to generate interest in the "middle" leagues.
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