RenOS
Dadder than dad
No bio...
User ID: 2051
RenOS
Dadder than dad
1yr ago
That referred to the "Do you walk around nude in public?". No, and I do not consider my behaviour around strangers to have much bearing on how I behave around family.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
1yr ago
Funny, I just recently got myself a carbonating machine as a reward for myself for my new postdoc position. Where I'm from, it's normal to drink essentially nothing but carbonated water; Before I had the machine, buying & transporting the bottles was a huge pain. I wouldn't drink uncarbonated water, it tastes terrible to me (on top of the fact that local water here is very hard & carbonation cancels that out to some degree).
Depends a lot on the country you're in, I'd honestly have to look it up myself for most of them. I'm not really directly involved with patients nor drug development, pretty much strictly lab experiments on one side and data analysis for existing data sets on the other.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
1mo ago
Admittedly I'm still on my first career of BTA itself and haven't gotten there, started near Terra with the Blakists and mostly stayed there except for a little bit of Clan action. But I'm in general a slow player for this stuff bc I spend way too much time in the mech bay.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
2mo ago
Where do you have the information from that this is the most common case? Afaik, the stats are pretty clear that the majority of companies aren't publicly traded, even in the US it's only something like 10%. If I go by my - admittedly very biased - german sample, founder=owner=CEO is quite common for smaller companies, and afaik the stats here are even worse in percentage terms.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
3mo ago
What are the reasons you don't want to live in other european countries? While I'm not terribly happy with the direction of the EU or my home country, they do seem clearly preferable compared to the UK. Especially most of north europe has some in my opinion critical perks:
- Parental money is pretty good, so having a family is quite easy
- (medical) doctor income is pretty good in several of them AFAIK
- objectively much better building standards
- a bit more subjective, but just visibly not in as much decay; London - and even moreso the few smaller cities I visited - just outright disgusted me at times at how it looks and feels like a third world country. Run-down buildings with smashed windows, barbed wires around the nicer places, cars that are scratched all over, non-capital crimes go de-facto mostly unenforced, streets with mounts of trash and the occasional literal human shit, erratic junkies on most trains and busses. Fairly blatant antisocial behaviour is also quite normalised.
- Food quality is imo also better, but admittedly a non-european may see it differently
RenOS
Dadder than dad
3mo ago
I'm not english but lived in London for a while and concur with what he writes. London is allegedly one of the best places in the UK but still sucks for long-term living unless you're either a well-earning childless professional or among the super rich, also doctors afaik objectively earn very bad by western standards in the UK.
Hmm, I agree that based on the figure of actual oil production, it seems questionable to claim that the Saudis "pumped like crazy", independent of whether Reagan talked them into it or anybody else.
Still, in terms of dependence on oil prices, it's widely accepted afaik that the USSR financed large parts of its own post-war economy by cannibalizing formerly better developed eastern european satellite states such as eastern germany and czechoslovakia. It's at least not only what I was taught in school, but also what contemporaries I personally know have told me. This obviously is not sustainable long-term, but high resource income can prop up a dysfunctional state indefinitely, see Venezuela. It's not a question of necessity, it means that in an alternative world with low crude oil the 70s might have seen a generally worse economy, increasing cannibalization leading to an even worse economy later on, and thus higher chances of earlier riots, protests and revolutions.
Selectorate ....
You will like an anecdote I have from a contemporary in the DDR who worked in military intelligence. He was a car mechanic/engineer and his main task was procuring, checking & maintaining vehicles both for general use by his colleagues and for various important people. One time, he officially was tasked with organizing multiple high-value cars for long-term use. Inofficially, this was more or less a party thrown to bribe insiders with hard-to-get western cars as the final touch. According to him, he was even offered to keep one of the cars for himself because he did such a good job getting them, but declined since he saw it as a betrayal of soviet principles (he is still a true believer). Obviously I have no way whatsoever to check this for myself, let alone prove it to you. But FWIW, I believe him; He never seemed to me like the type to make this up. And according to his kids he has have never owned any car but his Wartburg.
Ultimately I agree, though I think every system needs to "pay off" different interest groups to keep afloat one way or another, so I don't see a big difference between "high crude oil prices propped up the system" or "high crude oil prices allowed the system to buy off an interest group that would otherwise become unhappy".
RenOS
Dadder than dad
4mo ago
I think that its central claim, namely that it's not distortive since you can easily separate out "true" land value and development, is straightforward false. In practice, what we call land value is extremely dependent on the development around it. As a simple toy example, a neighbourhood group that works together to keep the streets clean increases the land value of their own houses, which in a pure georgist world would actively impoverish them.
That said, directionally speaking I'm not entirely opposed to moving into the direction of more georgism, I'm just opposed to going full george. Right now for example we have a questionable NIMBY feedback loop where real estate owners have an incentive to block any development nearby even if it does not actually bother them just to drive up their own land value. This means that you often have a small number of dedicated NIMBYs that genuinely are bothered by something, and a larger associated block of people that are tentatively on their side just because when in doubt, more land value is always better for you. A well-chosen land tax around 1 or 2 % might balance this out a bit better ( assuming 5%+ as full georgism). But you then also need to be dedicated to this tax. In the worst case, you grant extremely common exceptions so that everyone is paying land value taxes from de facto something like 20 years ago, and then it's strongly in everyones best interest again to drive it up.
Similarly, there are some decent georgish models for resource extraction such as the norwegian petroleum tax / oil fund system. I'm also in favor of those.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
6mo ago
Yes.
On another note, am I the only one who thinks scat and the two incests seem out of place compared to the others? In particular mother/daughter seems outright tame to me.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
6mo ago
I didn't click on the Aella link bc I'm at work. Nevertheless, I chose "past 4" with confidence. Take that as you may.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
7mo 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
Dadder than dad
7mo ago
I always wanted to write "Interstellar Warfare Consultant" in my CV!
RenOS
Dadder than dad
8mo 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 think we're not very far from each other in opinion. We both want different components to be viable to generate diversity of builds and gameplay, we're mainly quibbling about how complicated gameplay needs to get and how much needs to be "forced" through balance. I'm generally in favour of starting out with an extremely simple basic design and to generate emergent diversity through making all options genuinely viable. I'm not opposed to adding more complexity once the basic building blocks are solid, but one should be careful. In my experience, complex system may have more theoretic dimensions to generate theoretic diversity, but they very reliably devolve into there being just a single, maybe two or three, dominant strategies, and the balancing is even more work, not to mention that the complexity was a lot of work in the first place.
For your example, if we want to go for maximum realism: That's why "rogues" arguably didn't exist historically. Armour-less murderers at night could easily be armour-wearing knights at day. Highwaymen simply wore the best amour they could afford, and often were literally wayward knights. Realistic medieval combat, at a high "level", is just dudes in full plate armours with large shields, probably also on horses. No dual-wielding nonsense, no lesser armour categories, small knifes are strictly a back up weapon if you get into grappling on the ground. IF you want a rogue to exist as its own thing, particularly in team combat, they probably need a good helping of magic. Also, in most games I know, if there is a Rock-Paper-Scissor system (Fire Emblem for example), rogues are in fact not really able to take on armoured knights on their own without a significant level advantage. They usually use teleportation/fast movement to get close to ranged fighters/mages and kill them before they can unleash their spells, but armour they often struggle with.
As another example that may satisfy you, you could make it so that beam weapons/shields are balanced around early game cooling systems, and, as the cooling systems get better with tech, beam weapons/shields get better as well. But as the cooling is not infinitely strong and there are only a limited number of good slots for cooling, heat build-up will still limit ships in how much of either they can run, so they still have to make a trade-off between the best offensive component (beam weapons) and the best defensive component (shields) and will need to consider what other weapon and/or defense to run alongside it with spare slots. Together with an R-P-S system, it could still end up being reasonably balanced. Though from experience I suspect that it will end up being a system consisting entirely of two types of components in terms of gameplay - beam weapons/shields, and whatever is good against them, with any group that is good against something else playing at best an extremely marginal role. R-P-S systems ease up balancing a bit, but they're no replacement.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
8mo ago
Another way would be to have let's say 3 tech lvls, and the first tech lvl has only the base 3, the second has a variant for each, the third has another variant, for a total of 9 (and the variants are still similar enough so that they don't screw up balancing too much). But the base variants still get upgraded alongside. So you can have distinct "scary" high-tech variants without losing the basic balance.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
8mo ago
Just fyi, but I'm a german catholic and our local youth organisation Messdiener (literally "mass servants", when I was still a kid we would be obligated to help with the mass ~once per month per person) as well as the katholische Landjugend (literally "catholic rural youth", technically different but generally speaking was just the same people as the Messdiener) include both men and women, and does these kinds of things. From the things I remember off the top of my hat, the yearly 2-weeks camping trips had plenty of supervising adults of both sexes present and dating was rampant both between adults as well as the kids (sometimes even between the two groups if the age differential wasn't too big), likewise charity events like "72-hours of help" which usually involved building and/or repairing houses for charitable accommodation or for religious events.
But for both groups it would be very unusual to join only as an adult.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
8mo ago
Yes, but also no. It's definitely practice to over-specify it towards a specific person and that gives the person a giant edge. But if a super-star scientist (relatively speaking) comes around and applies for the job, they will often be hard-pressed to turn them down. This is quite rare however, and generally benefits the institutions (either they get exactly the person they want, or some kind of super-star).
RenOS
Dadder than dad
9mo ago
Aliens, obviously.
The example I was thinking about is a news story I heard some years ago about people setting up a shrine - I think in Latin America - with a Jesus on a toast with details way beyond the capabilities of a mere toaster. To my eyes, somebody obviously helped along with a burning needle or something similar (or just directly used a burning iron with a Jesus stamp form). Either way, I could only shake my head at the so-called critics claiming "it's coincidence" and the believers rightfully pointing out that it is almost physically impossible to be so - therefore, god. The people running the shrine clearly seemed to make some money off it.
Now that you made me write it out though, I realize that I nowadays would probably think that the critics are probably also simply paid to look silly. I'll leave it to the judgement of the reader whether I've not been cynical enough back when I was younger, or whether I've become too cynical by now.
Oh I also love hearing stories from psychoanalysts. I also like talking and speculating about the motives and reasons of both me and other people in a similar manner to psychoanalysts/dynamics. My wife studied psychology and originally planned to become a therapist, and her sister is currently almost finished with her education for becoming a systemic family therapist. We all love talking about this stuff. But that's the thing: Psychoanalytics/-dynamics is maximized for interesting-ness and/or pleasantry and very easily degenerates into a stagnant pattern were the patient just likes talking to the therapist (usually complaining about their parents or partners, we all love complaining about our parents or partners) and doesn't really want to change anything. The housewife who has been going to the same therapist for 30 years is not a meme without a reason.
Using more practical approaches (systemic family therapy is another more practical approach for example) doesn't forbid thinking about the bigger scope (calling career choices into question is an all-time favorite in all therapy styles), but actually asking the patient to "do stuff" makes the therapy less pleasant, tends to rock the patient(s) out of complacency and in general doesn't devolve into this particular failure mode. As you mention Psychoanalytics isn't opposed to action, but it also doesn't require it, which is important. Some high-motivation low-introspection people really do only need someone to force them to introspect and re-consider their live choices and then will go on to make the needed radical choices themselves, but many people not only need some practical directions on "what to do now" on top, they also need a push to actually do it.
And there is also the other direction. A push can not only help you achieve something, it can also trigger the opposite reaction. You may even go as far as saying that good therapy needs a certain baseline of hostility, basically amounting something like this: "You claim you want X? Well then, here are simple steps on how to get X. Now go out and DO IT. If you don't, we can devise a new strategy next week or we will talk whether this is really what you want". This forces the patient to put some skin in the game, which in turn makes it easier to realize what you really want. It's easy to claim that you always wanted to become an author, but if someone manages to get you 1 extra free hour per day through re-organization and prioritizing, asks you to actually start and even gives you some practical hints, you may realize that you have been fooling yourself. Or you may become an author. Either way you're better off.
Furthermore, the incremental changes favoured by practical approaches tend to give patients more breathing room. For the example of soxial anxiety, having appropriate coping strategies will expand your capabilities and make you more functional. In general, CBT favors making the patient more functional first. You can still decide afterwards that you're introverted and want to minimize social contact, but you can't entirely avoid it and need to handle the situations you can't avoid. This then makes bigger changes more easy and less likely to fail completely. An appropriate CBT can be the difference between a programmer working in home office most days and a totally dysfunctional unemployed shut-in. I have much less confidence in Psychoanalytics here, since shut-ins usually are poster boys for "need clear directions and lots of pushing" to get them out of their comfort zone.
For your chronically late example, it is the same: If you're already struggling at your current work, preparing for a career switch is a lot harder. I can tell you that from experience. But if you first are helped so that you struggle less at your current work, you then have more time you can dedicate to prepare for the switch. If you are more functional, you will have more spare time, you will have an easier time prioritizing, and so on. You can then use that extra slack as you please. Note how your example basically assumes a functional & decently motivated person; Someone who can just switch jobs and do fine, someone who needs no practical step-by-step guides, no pushes nor nudges.
Again, to be clear, I'm not opposed to thinking about the bigger scope or calling fundamentals into question. A good therapist will always do that. But since most people come to therapy mildly to severely dysfunctional, it is best to first start making them more functional, and then they can make bigger changes. And even once you're not (as) dysfunctional anymore, you will still profit from viewing everything in practical incremental steps, no matter how radical your goal is. And traditional psychoanalytics/dynamics often massively fails on these two accounts in practice, either talking endlessly about things in the past you can't change anymore or proposing radical changes that are almost guaranteed to fail if you can't get your shit together first.
RenOS
Dadder than dad
1yr ago
Christianity certainly used to be more dogmatic. My own parents told me that when a brothel was established in our village, the local church started a campaign were a rotation of people would stake out the brothel and report on everyone who visited it. Wild stuff. They themselves were protesting at the brothel as well, so this is not a hostile report by a non-religious, quite the opposite; They were proud that they successfully got rid of them.
My parents were also living together before marrying which got them into trouble since that was considered a "wild marriage" and the more conservative christians clearly tried to shame them into marrying(which my parents wanted to do anyway). And so on, I can give you a million examples of the church having been not much better than the woke not too long ago, from people who personally were around when it happened. Despite my more positive short description, I also had my fair share of bad experiences with dogmatic christians.
I'm also not claiming that it can never make a resurgence, but it is obvious that in many parts of the world Christianity had a certain position of dominance that they do not have anymore. And I'm cynical enough to attribute their recent mellowing out less to intrinsic do-good-ness than the good old "when I'm power" vs "when you're in power".
Finally, don't misunderstand me, I don't really have much beef with Christianity in particular anymore, and even got some newfound appreciation for it (my daughter even goes to an explicitly christian daycare!). But with age I'm more and more convinced that all ideologies get mean once they're to solidly in power, and I don't believe Christianity to be an exception. There are some genuinely nice devout that I know which are similar to what you're talking about, but most people unfortunately suck more than that.
FWIW, a large part, possibly majority but at least close to 50%, of our college-educated left-leaning friends (and it's not even unpopular among our non-college-educated friends) is some kind of vegetarian. Among those who aren't, the majority is constantly stressing how little meat they're eating. The line between them is pretty fuzzy, since there's a decent number of people who claim to not eat meat at home, but sometimes outside when there's no other option, and these people will sometimes consider themselves vegetarian anyway, sometimes not. Almost nobody is an unabashed meat eater. As justifications go, animal sympathy is at the top for the stricter vegetarians, health benefits for the less strict (this actually includes myself), climate considerations are generally second line ("and btw it's also good for the climate I've heard").
Surprisingly, this did not greatly change when we became parents; Yes there's very few super-militant vegetarian parents, but we know multiple families where only the children eat meat, not the parents, and eating relatively little meat is actually the norm.
Thanks. No, this is one of those foreigner-guessing-the-written-from-the-sound things that always seems to go wrong in english.
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