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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2083 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 24, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Who makes the decisions for “radio edits”?

Inspired by Bang Bang Bang, a delightfully duff song from British band Sports Team. It sees regular play on a local station. While most lines are unchanged, this one merited two radio blanks:

he don’t get - unless he takes his - to bed

The first blank, “hard,” isn’t surprising. Can’t be corrupting the youth. Whatever. But the second? In a song about mass shootings, you won’t say the word “gun”?

I’m wondering if this is controlled by the artist, by the label, by a regulator like, or at some other step in the process. Surely it wasn’t my station that decided Texans wouldn’t stand for the g-word. It’s probably not the FCC, either, unless various radio classics are grandfathered in. So what gives?

I'm sure you all are tired of evo-psych stuff, but why do women like to travel so much? I think traveling to a different country would be kinda cool but I'm really not as crazy about it as most women seem to be. To me, there's other higher priority things that don't cost so much and don't require a ton of planning.

It is a trope in fiction to meet an attractive man while traveling, and women appear to enjoy narrative-driven sexual fantasies while men enjoy visual-driven fantasies. But as for why women enjoy narrative-driven fantasies, I don’t know.

For young and older people I'm not sure women travel more than men but I've noticed a specific demographic of female travellers that doesn't really have a male counterpart. It's 25-40yo women who (usually) have some kind of higher education but are either unemployed or underemployed and spend a lot of time traveling, which is financed by their fathers, either directly through monthly stipends or indirectly by buying them a house/apartment with no strings attached.

This doesn't really have a corresponding demo for men because their families won't finance nominally successful men to have a layabout lifestyle, but they will do so for women and spending their time traveling is higher status than being a regular neet, so it isn't a black mark against the parents.

Men are more risk tolerant, novelty-seeking, and higher-earning, so it might sound counterintuitive to some that women travel more than men. Indeed, at least one article reports that 64% of worldwide travelers are women. The article mentions the male privilege of dying earlier as a possible source for the greater pool of female travelers.

Perhaps women have more free time from taking more time off between jobs, or having better work-life balance jobs where they can take long stretches of time off. Women also retire earlier, if they were working at all in the first place.

Women might also care less about splurging on travel from a lifetime of not needing money to attract/entertain men, and might have a reverse-endowment effect if they're spending money they didn't fully earn themselves. This would be consistent with women being the primary drivers of consumer spending.

There are further key differences in the female vs. male traveling experience, especially for young women and young men. Women's sexual market value is automatic and portable through their looks; men's not so much as male status is more situational and contextual. Women can just show-up and have FUN things happen to them.

  • Traveling for women means having excuses to take thotty photos in exotic locations for social media; getting introduced to, invited out, taken out to cool places by local and tourist men; having a limitless selection of tour guides, monkey-dancers, and court-jesters from online dating upon arrival, the option to ride the carousel with local and/or tourist men to their heart's content. Language barriers are less of an issue because local and tourist men will make the effort to communicate with them, whether it be in the women's native language or patiently in the local language.

  • Traveling for men means having to research any place you might want to go; having to figure out where the cool spots are; competing with both local and tourist men for the limited number of tourist women; figuring out how/where to meet local women and having to grind out approaches yourself; grinding hard for weeks on social media and online dating prior to the trip to hopefully have a non-zero number of dates. Language barriers are more of an issue because local and tourist women will usually not take the initiative to attempt communication in the men's native language, and have less patience for tourist men fumbling around in the local language.

having better work-life balance jobs where they can take long stretches of time off.

One of my brothers had a long, long time in the wilderness of dating apps (he's a high earner in a not-great location) and basically came to the conclusion, now popular in some internet corners, that some white-collar jobs are daycare for adult women. He lost count of the women he met who traveled internationally 2-6 times per year for 2+ weeks per trip (with the unspoken but sometimes spoken expectation that serious dating would involve joining all the trips and eventually paying for all of it). Somehow, their workplaces got along just fine without them during their long absences. Whatever jobs they had, they certainly had more generous leave policies than any of his private sector jobs or my public sector jobs. Apparently there's a secret third sector neither of us have found yet.

Women might also care less about splurging on travel from a lifetime of not needing money to attract/entertain men

Again, per my brother, many women he met had $100k+ email jobs, zero savings, and plenty of debt. Most of them perceived saving and being financially prepared for having a family as the man's job, and some were forthright enough to say it out loud. Anyone with that attitude would not have trouble spending money to travel frequently.

Apparently there's a secret third sector neither of us have found yet.

People in healthcare related professions (like nurses) can often get a lot of time off as compensation for overtime and night shifts as long as they don't spend it during the holidays. They are usually incentiviced to do this rather than taking cash compensation.

Doesn’t match my experience either. I’d like to see some stats before trying to read the tea leaves.

It surprises me that there were two of you who didn't get this impression. But here you go. https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelgoldstein/2024/02/22/women-love-to-travel-men-not-so-much/

Interesting. Probably it's my academic background, which is already very female-biased and pretty much requires one to be comfortable with travelling, including outright living in other countries. It seems I don't really register 64% women as an imbalance (even though it obviously logically is), since that's in line with my daily experiences (arguably, it's on the low end; When I started my degree, we were around 10 guys for 30 women, which after the first-year crash of nearly 50% reduced to around 4 guys for a little less than 20 women. Even now, I work almost exclusively in collaborations with women [which is intentional, since it opens up a lot of funding for me indirectly that I otherwise do not have access to]).

I guess it makes sense in that if I think back to my hometown, it wasn't very uncommon for older men to consider travelling a frivolous waste of money, while the older women seemed more accepting of the idea (though they still didn't travel without their husbands). Norms change, and the same kind of men still considers it a waste of money, but the women then just go travel anyway, I suppose?

It doesn't really fit with the school friends I kept in touch with, but those unsurprisingly were also pre-filtered for more open-minded personalities.

Now that I've read this article, I find this comment at the end funny:

But you can’t blame the travel companies for focusing on the millions of women eager to explore. Men will just have to find a way to break the chains that stop them from seeing the world.

This is like, the exact opposite sentiment you'd get if it was men traveling and women staying at home.

Actually, yes, travel companies should focus more on women. Women only don't travel because of historical oppression. We need equality in frivolous traveling.

If some subset of men don't travel, it's due to toxic masculinity, them being lazy, stingy tightwads who lack interest in other cultures and curiosity about the world.

If some subset of women don't travel, it's due to toxic masculinity, the men in their lives trying to control them, them being too burdened by the physical and emotional labor of keeping households and workplaces afloat to have time and energy to travel.

Huh. I guess so.

It’s a status symbol thats hard to fake. Your Instagram photos are geolocated- while it takes at least some domain specific knowledge to tell if designer goods are fake.

It’s also a vacation, and people in general like those- you probably notice this more with women because they talk more.

I don't get this impression, at least not strongly. If anything, the people I know who have actually lived and/or spend multiple months in exotic countries are almost exclusively men. Maybe women do go a bit more often, but usually to more generic, touristy spots.

My experience matches Arjin's, in that travelling is just generically high status behaviour at the moment, and women tend to be much more receptive to signalling status behaviour. Also, everyone enjoys not having to work, and women tend to have less pressure on that front, so they can have a bit more leeway in how often and when they can go on trips.

Evo-psych makes a bad turn when it tries to explain behaviors this specific. It's a sign of status, simple as (which can flip valance depending on the time period and conditions, like being tanned vs. being pale). The costs and the planning are a part of the point, as they gatekeep those that can't afford it.

Are smart phones a Bostromian 'black ball' that just makes everything worse upon being discovered?

They inflicted mobile gaming on the world. They made social media worse I think. Dating apps proliferated. Sleep disruption. Short-form video in an ugly vertical format. People are watching movies on smartphones, it's destroying film. All these companies that make you install their app (it doesn't work).

Almost everything that can be done on a smart phone is done better on a PC or laptop. Cameraphones were good enough for communicating IMO.

Google maps is actually helpful but besides that? 2 factor authentication? Seems like a net negative to me.

Eh? Smartphones have made my life immeasurably better (well, I can measure it, in the sense I would willingly pay a lot of money for a phone if there was no other way to get one cheaper).

  1. It's a phone. People forget these devices do, sometimes, allow for phonecalls.
  2. It is a very convenient and half-decent camera.
  3. I can use the internet anywhere I please.
  4. I read books on it.
  5. There are very few tasks that make me want to shift to my iPad, gaming laptop or gaming pc. Mostly if I need to handle complex forms, multitask a lot, or need the screen real-estate. I do 99% of my writing on my phone, I can touch type on a virtual keyboard with my eyes closed, no joke.

The ball is very white as far as I'm personally concerned. Being even 50% as good at {everything} as a larger, more dedicated device is inherently valuable, especially when they fit in your pocket and carry charge for a whole day. I'd say it's closer to 80-90% in actuality.

My biggest negative on smartphones and tablets is how much everything on them is designed to be distracting. Like you don’t just dip into an app, it’s working hard to make you spend as much time as possible there instead of doing something else. It’s a hyper stimulating experience and im tired of looking around everywhere at people who think socializing means sitting in silence staring at separate screens and not talking or doing anything.

Not to mention a lot of apps suck on the phone when compared to their desktop or browser versions. Wunderground app for example. I like to click on local weather stations and view their temperature history and some other stats, the app doesn't let you do as much of this and not very easily.

I don’t buy the dating app hate. It wasn’t smart phones that ruined the OkCupid model. Women were always going to gravitate to a system where all men are filtered by default and they get to opt-in to who gets the privilege of messaging them.

There was a temporary window wherein there was a structural advantage to being verbose and tech-savy. This was always going to be temporary.

I think so. Something happened in 2012 when it came to interpersonal relationships, depression, test scores, etc. And all these trends are in the wrong direction This shit is bad news bears.

Relevant article: https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/what-the-heck-happened-in-2012

I think we should probably be more specific, its social media and algo driven content serving (especially short form) that's the issue, not watching movies on your phone or w/e.

There are plenty of studies that show this, its not some kind of new and unknown subject. The issue isn't that we don't know what's harmful, it's that there are powerful commercial interests opposing regulation. It's the same thing with online casinos, it's not the internet that's the issue, it's specifically the gambling sites.

How old are you?

My life before smart phones was so different. I love that I can pull out and read any book I want, I love that I don't need a separate device for music, I love that I can research anything anytime instead of writing it down and searching through my encyclopedia at home.

Have you ever tried a long road trip with a physical map?

Yeah they ruin a lot of stuff and may not be worth it but don't forget what they've added.

How old are you?

Middle aged. I remember all the way back to the world where normies had no internet, and then the later world when more cutting-edge weirdos had home dialup internet.

I love that I can pull out and read any book I want,

Physical books or kindle + libgen. I find reading on the phone to be terrible, and really, kindle isn't great either.

I love that I don't need a separate device for music

I recently bought an mp3 player again so I can run or hike with music without having my phone along. It's wonderful.

I love that I can research anything anytime instead of writing it down and searching through my encyclopedia at home.

This part is certainly convenient. I'm not sure I really learn more or retain more, though, compared to writing notes down and then internet searching at home.

Have you ever tried a long road trip with a physical map?

Yep, I moved across several states to a completely unknown city using physical maps. It was fine. My goal now on long road trips is to look up directions before I leave and then not look at maps again.

Physical books or kindle + libgen. I find reading on the phone to be terrible, and really, kindle isn't great either.

Some of this is different strokes for different folks - I would never in a million years ago back to a separate music player.

I will say that I have a kindle and used it over my phone for a long time until I got an oversized phone and then suddenly reading on the phone didn't bother me.

Some of this is different strokes for different folks

Yes, definitely. I have an upcoming backpacking trip where my phone will be off or in airplane mode (when I need it for navigation, unfortunately) for 5ish days. It will be heavenly. And I'll be reminded when I get back how little I really need the phone and how much I pay per month to have a texting/email/wikipedia pocket tracking device.

...Has anyone ever heard of attempts to use freezing water to provide mechanical force for metalworking? Making pressings, for example?

I have a metal water bottle which got squashed. I filled it with water and put it in the freezer and it popped back out.

Metalworking? No- despite the popular misconception water and ice are considerably more compressible than essentially all metals. You'd probably want something more along the lines of Dexpan, which when mixed with water can (according to the tech specs) provide 18 ksi of compressive force, which might be enough to form some softer metals like copper or aluminum.

They say that ice is incompressible, but it's only 1/20th as incompressible as steel (9 GPa vs. 200 GPa elastic modulus). I'm not sure how well it would work given that difference.

(The "elastic modulus" of air isn't really a meaningful concept, but if you ignore that then the right number would be 0.0001 GPa, or 100000x as compressible as ice.)

Jussay Smol-yay is back in the news this week, with the release of a new documentary The Truth About Jussie Smollett?, which purports to tell an alternative perspective on Smollett's claims to have been the victim of a racially motivated (and homophobic) hate crime on the streets of Chicago, for which he was indicted and convicted for filing a false police report. I think the question mark in the title tells you everything you need to know about the director's confidence in his narrative. Even film critics at progressive media outlets are giving it short shrift.

What is the most addicting game you’ve played recently, what mechanic made it most addicting, and how do you feel in the midst of that mechanic?

Faster Than Light. Yes, I'm late to the party.

You're a lone spaceship trying to outrun a massive, constantly advancing enemy space fleet while you must fight random enemies and avoid running out of fuel and ammo. It's a roguelike so sometimes you just get screwed by RNG.

The best part of the game is the tension during difficult moments. You are low on fuel and only have a few missiles left, and the enemy fleet is only two jumps behind you. Suddenly, as you try to jump past a star, a well-armed mercenary ship uncloaks and demands you give up your ship and your crew as slaves. As you begin to engage, a warning blares across the screen -- the nearby star is unstable! Moments later your ship is hit with a massive solar flare, causing random fires to break on your ship. Your crew scrambles to put these out, sustaining burns in the process. Luckily, you've kept your best pilot and gunner away from the fires, but BANG! the merc ship has fired a hull-piercing missile into your ship's bridge which is now rapidly decompressing. Your pilot attempts to repair the hull breach, but you're not sure he'll be able to fix it before asphyxiating. You may need to sacrifice a different crew member to perform this repair to have any hope of escape. You pause the game to consider your options...

I had a heated 3 month fling with FTL back when it came out before I went somewhere for vacation and quit cold turkey. It was first roguelike (and one of my last - definitely not a good genre for me), and adjusting to the expectations of extreme punishment plus cruel RNG took a while. I remember it took me dozens of tries to win the game for the first time, and then I beat it immediately on the next run. And from then on, it was like a 50/50, which really surprised me, because of how utterly wrecked I used to get, and it's not as if the challenge had changed by leveling up or something.

In the middle of it, it felt to me like roleplaying in a very pure way, creating a narrative of a desperate ship captain in this scifi setting who needs to pull on all resources and luck to barely edge out survival for one more node. I don't think I've gotten quite the same experience from other games. And, unfortunately, I think I'd prefer to keep it that way, given how much time I'm likely to waste if I found something similar.

I got back into Elden Ring a few months ago, fairly hardcore (lvl 1 challenge runs, etc.). The addiction didn't last too long, but it was pretty strong for a solid two months.

People say GRRM was just there to have his name on the tin for marketing, but I don't know how anyone literate can conclude this. The lore of Elden Ring has the most profound aesthetic depth I've ever seen in a video game, and that depth is simply not there in Dark Souls 3 or in Shadow of the Erdtree (the former felt like the Walmart version of Elden Ring, and the latter like the Hobbit compared to the LotR trilogy). To me it's clear the big-brain behind the magic is Martin himself, and, in his own words, "when the sun has set, no candle can replace it."

Mechanically, the game is challenging for casuals, but it's fulfilling to play well. The defining design principle is that actions should be deliberate and if you get hit, it is your fault, and there is something you as a mortal human (ie., not Serral) could reasonably have been expected to do to prevent it.

The challenge that baited me into learning the game seriously was "Can you beat the Tree Sentinel as a lvl 1 wretch?" It's available right from the start of the game, and at first it seems impossibly hard, but it actually isn't once you learn the fight. At first, you'll die over and over again in the first ten seconds, and the challenge seems like something only a demigod could do; but with a bit of practice, you start to notice that all the attacks have predictable behavior, and eventually, not only does it seem doable, it feels downright easy.

The story is not told in a traditional fashion, and if you wait for the game to tell you the story, you'll miss it entirely, because the game never does. Rather, you're expected to pay attention to the detail of the world by piecing together snippets of information you retrieve from item descriptions. This sounds annoying, and it is until you get used to it. But once you get used to it, you'll be like "huh, I wonder what that Shaded Castle is all about. I never paid any attention to the items or people there, I wonder if there's anything interesting?" And there is! (If you want to know, the guy who's supposed to be ruling the castle is a weak simp who's been booted out of his own palace, which is now ruled by a foreigner who threw all the beautiful artwork in the trash, and the entire place is now flooded in poison and overrun by screeching subhumans. Gee, what could the game have been trying to tell us? Everything in Elden Ring is like this, and you can absolutely waltz through the game without noticing any of it if you don't pay attention.)

Finally, Elden Ring is one of the only games I've ever played where I genuinely believe the team's visual designers are more cognitively gifted than its programmers. I don't mean the game is has Realistic Graphics, which I don't care about (I usually prefer stylized graphics to realism, e.g., the Persona series). I mean the visual design itself is absolutely stunning. For example, the Church of Vows is aligned such that when you look through the front, you see Rya Lucaria Academy, and when you look through the rear, you see the Erdtree, because at this church were married the leaders of these two factions to resolve a great war. Once again, you can play the game and be totally oblivious to this sort of thing; but the game is saturated with this sort of high-IQ, intentional design. It is beautiful, and I have the highest respect for it.

My biggest criticism is that the game is bad at explaining how to play. This was my first souls game, and at the start I found the mechanics frustrating and counterintuitive, and the game's hints are worthless ("Did you know you cannot ride your horse indoors?" Yes, thank you for that profound insight, now how do I use the skill in my right-hand weapon?). And even aside from that, there are a zillion small design issues and bugs. But these problems fade into irrelevance in the light of the glory the game achieves. Its heights are so high. It is the only game I've ever played that feels like it successfully transcends the middle class nature of video games and ascends to the same tier of artistic achievement as good literature.

People say GRRM was just there to have his name on the tin for marketing, but I don't know how anyone literate can conclude this. The lore of Elden Ring has the most profound aesthetic depth I've ever seen in a video game, and that depth is simply not there in Dark Souls 3 or in Shadow of the Erdtree (the former felt like the Walmart version of Elden Ring, and the latter like the Hobbit compared to the LotR trilogy). To me it's clear the big-brain behind the magic is Martin himself, and, in his own words, "when the sun has set, no candle can replace it."

The reason people say this is pretty simple, it's that Elden Ring's setting, to the DS veteran, mostly is just more of the same as has been done the last three times. It's just hard to really see Martin's stamp. You can of course claim that he has done it better, but this is quite subjective. There are a lot of arguments about that already, and everyone has their own opinion. ER is undoubtly a good game, but most of your post could be written equivalently for any DS game, including even the aesthetic design (well, maybe not DS2, as much as I think it is somewhat underrated) and, funnily enough, even Martin's quote. Partially for this reason I got bored with ER halfway through the game, though I'll certainly pick it up eventually again. As a DS veteran you just can't shake the feeling that you have already played this game 3+ times, with near-identical story beats, setting and mechanics.

I mean I tried Dark Souls after Elden Ring. I just don’t see it, man.

The collapse of a great society sentiment is there, yes, but the difference in depth and subtlety is the difference between a post on /r/collapse and Meditations on Moloch.

See, for example, this reddit explanation of the unique vertical level design of DS1. Imo none of the other entries, including ER, have done it quite as masterfully, even if they clearly were inspired by it. Which is fine; They have done other things better.

Edit: Btw, DS3, since you mentioned it, is probably my least favorite of the bunch. DS2 at least tried a bit more to do its own thing. DS3 returned to the roots, yes, but in the process feels the most like a rehash of DS1, but invariably worse since a copy never reaches up to the original. That's imo one of the reasons why ER was deliberately given a different name, marketed as something different and has at least some clear deviations in the design, such as the open world.

There is also the element in which, since the DS entries are explicitly intended to be different iterations of the same loops, makes them work together better than alone. See this post which in my view - despite me agreeing that DS3 is a weaker entry! - entirely misses the point of the DS3 design: By the time of this iteration, the cycle has been going on too long, the fire has been lit too often, so that the sacrifice has to be ever greater for but a sliver of the greatness achieved earlier. The message is clear: This time around, just lighting it yet again will not be sufficient. You have to find another way. It's deliberate.

Edit2: I also think, since, as you mentioned, a lot of the design choices are easy to miss & somewhat subject to interpretation, DS games are especially susceptible to the tendency to always like the first game of the bunch you played. You'll always be more willing to look into all the details, all the theories, etc. the first time around. The more you play, the more you tire of it, so you'll miss more and more on average.

I got into Anno 1800 (pro tip: you can get the base game cheap and cream API the DLC for free) about a year ago and Holy. Fucking. Shit.

I haven't had a game touch my dopamine receptors like that since I was a teenager first getting into gaming.

It was un-ironically as close as I've ever gotten to wire-heading. The temptation to play at the expense of food, sleep, work performance, sex, socialization was intense.

What made it so addicting:

The production chains being complex enough to be challenging while not so complex as to shut down from overwhelm.

Ship logistics was a ton of fun, getting better at that and seeing it pay off was sweet.

The Victorian aesthetic I find really compelling, and the tense action against the other AI (who you later realize are absolutely useless at the game) makes for a really fun juggling balance and tension.

The different areas provide variety and a steady march of new challenges to wrap your brain around.

Each phase of the game has a distinct feel, and is fun on its own merits. Desperate economic balancing when you're on an island or two. Balancing wide/tall expansion with conflict in mid game. And finally hyper-optimizing and paper-clipping in end game once you've wiped out everything else.

I finally stopped playing incredibly suddenly once I was at about 150,000 investors and had just started the final production chains for the higher level skyscraper goods. The level of optimization required at that point (my goal was 1,000,000 investors) meant I was largely following templates I found on the German (lol) template sites, including their researched specialist stacks. At that point I wasn't really playing anymore, I was just following digital Lego instructions. I was also getting mildly tired of having to raze and re-design suboptimal islands repeatedly as I got better/learned how the game worked. I guess I could have continued to play blind and try to get to 1mil myself, but that would have taken so long, and required even more "raze and re-design" moments, so I got bored and stopped. Sucked a good couple hundred hours of me before I did though.

How do you feel in the midst of that mechanic:

Fucking incredible, it was the perfect level of challenge and the challenge level contributed to increase at a pace that allowed you to skill up perfectly in sync with it.

It was seriously so compelling and so fucking fun.

It was basically an instant drop into flow state on command, it was magical.

The sudden end was kind of surprising to me. I went from being so compelled to play it to basically 0 interest over night. Other games I adore (civilization, paradox games, battlefield) I have played for decades and will continue to play for decades. Anno was a whirlwind romance in comparison.

Highly recommend.

Looking at my game files, I don't seem to have any(??). It doesn't even have a Steam workshop.

I can't remember why I bought the game, as you seem to be able to pirate the whole thing.

Maybe I wanted mods but never got around to it because I was enjoying vanilla.

Extended power plant range was on the list of mods I wanted though, kind of cheaty, but it gets tedious.

Hardspace Shipbreaker. Attempting to dissemble a ship as neatly and efficiently as possible with a minimum of waste was enormously absorbing, appealing to the same part of my brain that can't relax until everything in my apartment is in its right place.

Looks at his current play-count for saved worlds

Well, as of late, I'd have to say Vintage Story. As for why? It's hard to place down on one single element. There's just something weirdly appealing about making wine and baking pies in a post-apocalyptic lovecraftian eldritch horror setting were your overall goal is to make it to producing steel. Oh, and possibly figuring out the entire reason for all that post-apocalyptic lovecraftian eldritch horror.

Mechanics-wise, it also has a wide plethora of emergent gameplay. Not requiring containers to store things and just being able to put your tools down on the ground or leaning up against a nearby wall has a charm all of it's own.

I am very much not a survival game person, but I do appreciate the idea of a Minecraft for adults. I've seen a bit of gameplay, and it's clear to me that the game conveys 1% of the difficulty of bootstrapping even medieval civilization from scratch (which is a hundred times more than most offer). People seem ready to weep when they finally get copper tooling.

Vintage Story has alot of difficulty gates for survival that give you plenty to do in-game, above and beyond acquiring metals - it can also cause some emergent hilarity. Just last night while playing, what turned into a scouting mission for more pine resin flipped into an effort to capture and bring back a female goat for my domestication efforts before quickly devolving down to fighting for my life against a horde of wolves in order to capture said damn goat.

All because if you make sure your diet has enough variety, it increases your health, and I need to work on dairy production.

Fun times.

The epic quest for the rarest commodity in the game: a bee hive.

ffffff-

I haven't had time to play the newer release, but I'll second this from the 1.18 update.

The part I found most addictive is how there's always one next small task to run, usually 'just' a five or ten minute task, and they're almost all pretty engaging. Absolutely will eat several in-game days of 'and I just need to finish this - oh and -'.

WoW Classic is still the most addicting game I have ever played. Sometimes I will randomly think of Stranglehold Vale and get an insane itch to create a new character.

Yeah I just played recently on a private server. Was fun, accelerated xp so you don’t waste your entire life leveling hah.

A new one is coming out for cataclysm soon and I want to try that.

World of Warcraft is bound up in so many memories of my young childhood, friends I used to have, playing with my dad, my brother, returning to it feels like going back to a city long after everyone you knew there moved out or passed away. And Classic feels (or at least did at the start) like you’re surrounded by so many other people for whom the same is true, trying to get back something that time has taken from them, irreversibly.

Still a great game though.

Same, except the game came out when I was in college and your post made me feel old. But like you, I tried playing WoW classic and it just wasn't the same. The game was (mostly) the same of course, but my frame of reference was different and it had a much different feel as a result. I ultimately didn't stick with it, though I did have fun for a while (and my wife said I was "bellowing with joy" when I got my first green drop in Elwynn Forest, lol).

Arma Reforger.

I am somewhat embarrassed to admit I have over 3700 hours in its predecessor, Arma 3. That is almost half a year of my life, and it wasn't all just leaving the game on idle. About 500 in Reforger.

For the unfamiliar, the Arma franchise is what happens when you take Battlefield and force adherence to a semblance of realism. Combined arms on the company scale, presented in either first or third person. Guns are lethal, you're not a super soldier, finding yourself facing a main battle tank in an open field, without effective AT only really ends one way. The maps can be enormous, and they must be, to accommodate the full spectrum of modern firepower.

Your role, in the grand scheme, is usually one of profound insignificance. You are a grunt. You might be a grunt with the keys to a fifty ton armored fighting vehicle, a helicopter, or a supersonic jet, but your fundamental state is that of a small, fragile component in a much larger machine.

To actually achieve anything, you must look to teamwork. You must find people willing to be the other cogs in the larger machine. You will find yourself reading the USMC's small unit tactics manual and applying it to great effect in a video game. In the limit, you could run a West Point course (and this happens, since a variant of Arma is marketed as a genuine military simulation for actual soldiers).

There's no one way to play Arma. You can play it single-player, either in its curated campaign, a wider sandbox, custom missions that push the bar for what the engine allows. You might play multiplayer, where experiences range from hardcore one-life ops with a hundred other human players vs AI, or even other humans, to people RPing a semi-functional society. Remember, DayZ and PUBG both began as Arma mods.

The reason why I have an ungodly number of hours in Arma 3 is a feature/game mode called Zeus.

This mode elevates one player to the status of a god, or more accurately, a Dungeon Master. From a top down, real time strategy perspective, the Zeus controls every facet of the unfolding scenario. They spawn enemies, call in air strikes, change the weather, and narrate the conflict, all in service of providing a compelling experience for the dozens of human players who have entrusted them with their Saturday evening. As a child, I arranged green plastic army men in my backyard. As an adult, I marshaled platoons of real people from across the globe. Among them, a cohort of astonishingly racist yet disarmingly hilarious British alcoholics, who, in a display of baffling camaraderie, adopted a young doctor from India into their virtual unit. I am scheduled to have a drink with some of these individuals in the physical world later this week. The kinds of bonds you can make in the game are sometimes ridiculous.

But Arma 3 is an artifact of a bygone era. It was never a paragon of technical elegance, and time has only magnified its flaws. The player controller is famously obtuse, the performance is inconsistent, and it lacks a constellation of quality of life features we now consider standard. It is, in a word, clunky.

Arma Reforger? It's very much a transitional product. Bohemia Interactive wanted to overhaul the entire game engine, and decided to launch a glorified paid demo to keep players busy till Arma 4 came out. Then, to the surprise of both the devs and cynical older fans like me, said demo blew up, and is now a genuinely good game which approaches greatness when modded.

The critical distinction is this: Arma Reforger is a superior shooter. The fundamental act of moving, aiming, and firing is vastly improved. You are no longer wrestling with an awkward digital puppet that seems determined to glitch through the terrain at the most inopportune moments. Clipping your car into a small rock will no longer reliably send you to space. The graphics, while not at the absolute cutting edge, are entirely serviceable and a significant leap forward. The friction between player intent and in game action has been dramatically reduced.

Alas, this reduction in friction has come at the cost of systemic depth. The simulation is not as comprehensive. The new equivalent of the Zeus mode is a pale, half baked imitation of its predecessor. The artificial intelligence of non player characters is unimpressive, and this is a damning statement when one recalls that the old AI was hardly a legion of tactical geniuses. Yet the core of the Arma experience persists, and a new dimension has been unlocked: the player versus player combat is orders of magnitude better. I now find myself genuinely enjoying large scale PvP, an activity I had long dismissed as a chaotic and laggy sideshow in Arma 3. The smoother, more responsive core mechanics make all the difference. Add to this monumental, DLC quality modifications like RHS, which transports the default Cold War setting to the present day, and you have a robust platform for tactical conflict. Getting a few friends together to engage in a firefight with other human beings is now a clean, enjoyable, and rewarding loop.

In a nutshell, Call of Duty and Battlefield use pretty pictures and the illusion of real world weaponry to sell the fantasy of being a supersoldier. Arma will have you feeling like a real and all-too-vulnerable soldier in the fire of modern conflict.

I have very high hopes for Arma 4 now. While I genuinely enjoy PvP at times, I yearn for the experience of herding human cats through my own campaigns. If done right, everyone has a great time you can't really replicate anywhere else, and you end up with drinking buddies for life.

Did you ever play DayZ, either the Arma 2 mod or the standalone game? What did you think of that?

I didn't really play much of Arma 2, and DayZ never really appealed to me. The gameplay seems like an exercise in misery, even watching highlight reels never sold me on the concept.

I must give you props on accomplishing something I wouldn't have thought possible: you almost make me want to try Arma sometime, through the sheer enthusiasm and love you clearly have for the game. I strongly suspect I would hate it, as I tend to be not too fussed about realism in games (indeed, Battlefield is already the more realistic shooter compared to others I have played a lot of, such as Quake 3 or UT2k4) and so I expect I would find Arma somewhat frustrating. But there is something enchanting with the picture you paint of the kind of fun you unlock when you can study infantry tactics manuals to get better at a game, or the way it forces teamwork in a way other games simply do not even try to. Perhaps if I ever clear out my prodigious backlog, I should give it a shot.

You're welcome! Given how much I've played the franchise, since I was a wee bairn mucking around with the original Operation Flashpoint on my first pc, it would be weird if I didn't heartily endorse it. It's no Tarkov, the kinda game you have a love-hate relationship with but can't stop playing.

For many, it's an acquired taste. There are all kinds of official and fan-made game modes, from the comparatively frantic King of the Hill, which, if not Battlefield levels of intense, is still up there. Then there are full milsim servers, where you might spend half an hour of downtime before being cleared for a sortie, or a medevac crew waiting for a mass-cas event. People usually find their niche quickly, as a Zeus, I did a little bit of everything, even if the majority of the work was commanding the AI around and keeping players engaged.

The main frustration of players accustomed to more casual shooters (let alone Quake) is the downtime. Yet that downtime serves a very important purpose! It offers time for movement and maneuver, allows for wide flanks or ambushes. It makes death mean something, even if most servers won't have a one-life system. You are fighting the world's most dangerous game in PvP, and the pleasure of merking some poor fool arises includes the knowledge that he isn't going to immediately respawn in the building next door and be upon you in a few seconds.

But there is something enchanting with the picture you paint of the kind of fun you unlock when you can study infantry tactics manuals to get better at a game, or the way it forces teamwork in a way other games simply do not even try to.

I don't mean to oversell it, since the level of teamwork can vary considerably.

In organized operations, one can witness communication and coordination that rival professional military practice. Squads have defined roles, leadership structures are respected, and air assets are integrated with ground forces according to established procedure. It is a simulationist's dream. A lot of players are active duty or ex-military, and they love their day job so much they do it again when they're off.

On more casual servers, the dynamic is closer to a Battlefield match, but with a crucial difference. Players may initially operate as individuals, but the game's mechanics consistently pressure them towards cooperation. Almost everyone uses a microphone. A direct request for assistance or coordination is, in my experience, almost always met with a good-faith effort. An emergent cooperative equilibrium tends to form out of shared necessity.

Even when not playing with a clan, I always try to brighten days/induce PTSD by really getting it on in VC:

"I can't feel my legs" + realistic sobbing is a good one.

"Tell my mom I love her" I say, neglecting the fact I almost never actually call.

"Tell my wife that... I have another wife" always goes down well. Never fails to get a chuckle.

"I can see the light, are you an angel?" followed by kissing sounds when someone works on my dying corpse. Or "buddy, that's the sun" if someone pulls that line on me.

(My neighbors love me)

Anyway. Just a few years ago, I would have recommended another FPS that was, itself, well-placed between Battlefield and Arma. Squad, as the name suggests, is a team based milsim-lite, the spiritual successor to a Battlefield 2 mod. It is more rigid than Arma, but also more fast-paced. You play your class with a well-defined role, on a medium sized map. It has a higher skill floor and lower skill ceiling. You must work as a team to get anything done, but often because an individual is unable to do very much except shoot and move. You can't even drive a car without getting approval from your Squad Leader!

I can no longer recommend it very strongly. The developers, in an attempt to further incentivize teamwork by "slowing down" the gameplay, implemented changes to weapon handling that I found debilitating. The player's avatar now moves with the sluggishness of someone suffering from both advanced Parkinson's disease and severe asthma. The stated goal was to make gunfights more deliberate, but the result was a pervasive and frustrating clumsiness that felt less like tactical realism and more like a systemic handicap.

I no longer play it, but many still do. It might be worth checking out, you'll fit right in coming from Battlefield. I would still recommend Arma instead, but watch some gameplay videos to figure out what appeals to you.

RubixRaptor: Absolute chaos and tomfoolery.

Operator Drewski: More considered, tactical gameplay. My ideal.

Karmakut: My man, have you considered joining the Army?

Minecraft. Mining. Relaxed.

So what are you reading? I just finished The Children of Men by P.D. James, review below. Also working on Way of Kings, Capital, and some Kant.

Didn't realize that the author of this was THE P.D. James, of thriller writing fame. I guess there is something about British authors who abbreviate there first and middle names and pulling surprisingly deep science fiction commentary that has stood the test of time (thinking of you E.M. Forster).

The Children of Men is a book about a world with ultra-low fertility, in other words, an extreme version of a world that we already live in. I had a friend's birthday party at the park a couple weeks ago (I'm getting close to 30 unfortunately), and I noticed that out of the 20 or so couples there, only one had a child. And I think this is becoming increasingly true over the whole entire world. Many of the downstream aspects of this fact also seem to be shared between James' novel and reality: the prevalence of pet parents, the lack of interest in the future of society (but a fixation on the past), and an obsession with health and safety at all costs.

Beyond the social commentary, the actual plot of the novel is a little lackluster. It centers on an Oxford Professor of History, Theo, who happens to be the cousin of the dictator of England. Theo lives a pretty unremarkable and utterly selfish life (even before the "Omega" where most men suddenly become infertile), until he becomes involved with a rebel group that wants to enact some minor changes in the governmental system, but more importantly, is sheltering a woman who happens to be pregnant. Theo's time with this group changes his inner and outer lives almost completely: it's amazing what hope for the future does to an individual, although I was left wondering at the end how much would really change in England after the birth of this child.

Having children is no basis for a moral system in of itself (this was Chesterton's critique of H.G. Wells), but it sure as hell makes constructing a society a hell of a lot easier. Unfortunately I think our world is headed to a future more similar to what James envisioned in the 1990s. People simply aren't having children: I'm guilty of this too: it's not like I'm close to being married even. And that, I think, means that this society isn't very long for this world.

Didn't realize that the author of this was THE P.D. James, of thriller writing fame. I guess there is something about British authors who abbreviate there first and middle names and pulling surprisingly deep science fiction commentary that has stood the test of time (thinking of you E.M. Forster).

Iain Banks (literary fiction)/Iain M Banks (SF) surely fits into the same bucket, despite spelling out his first name?

Yes he is another one that fits this mold.

Moving this from the friday fun thread:

I'm hooked on this Russian blog of (mostly funny) stories of a nuclear submarine officer. Y'all should put it through Grok or Deepseek or whatever, it might still be funny in machine translation.

You should like Pokrovsky as well, I think he's the OG darkly funny submarine officer.

Pokrovsky is one of the authors directly endorsed by Ovechkin of the above blog, so I probably should, yes.

Sounds like my kind of humor.

Two recommendations in response:

Thunder Below, a WWII memoir of an America sub captain. Known for sinking a number of Japanese ships and one train. Alternating hilarious and awesome.

A Country Doctor’s Notebook, collected serials by Mikhaio Bulgakov. English translation here; no idea where to read the original.

Ah... This is so good. I didn't know I needed to read this, thank you. The Missile Officer is a character.

This is amazing, thank you! Already dying on the Men’s Day cake.

In just a year since my last time with Fyodor Mikhailovich, I read Gambler last week.

As with Notes from Underground, it holds up amazingly well 150+ years later (give or take all the gentry out and about), with the outchitel MC being a likewise colorful fellow who is entirely ruled by, and unashamed of, his addiction to gambling and pathological simpery. It is morbidly funny to me that gacha games, the scourge of modern vidya, combine the worst of these exact two vices; I offhandedly wondered what Fyodor Mikhailovich would've made of such superstimuli, Alexey (who seemed a rather unsubtle author stand-in) sure seems like the ideal target audience.

Reading about it online after the fact, people seemed to be confused by the abrupt ending with a very rushed resolution of character arcs via a "where are they now" loredump from an in-universe character. I agree that the pacing is weird in places, but to me it seems partly deliberate - there is a certain point ~midway where the book's focus seems to overtly switch from Alexey's simping struggles and general drama around la baboulinka's inheritance to the titular gambling and its consequences for the human race, with all the errant nobility in Roulettenburg (is it still nominative determinism if it's this obvious?) and especially la baboulinka's own downward spiral providing no shortage of demonstrations. The gambling-related segments are IMO the highlight of the book, written in a florid, visceral, almost compulsively rambling way that leaves little doubt that Dostoevsky is writing from extensive first-hand experience.

With this in mind the abrupt ending reads less like a rushed job, and more like a narrative device - the book is explicitly presented as "notes" Alexey is writing during his misadventures in Roulettenburg, which he sometimes abandons for weeks at a time, and has to recount everything for the reader once he takes the pen back up; Mr. Astley (who provides the aforementioned loredump) gives the down-on-his-luck protagonist some money out of pity, but at this point has very little faith that he will use it for anything other than gambling; Alexey in turn is stirred enough by the memories and recollections Astley's words evoke to have a lucid break, feeling genuinely hopeful to try and restart his life, IIRC even mentioning he's excited to put things to paper again... and the book ends, right then and there. YMMV but I felt like the implied, unspoken final relapse was a pretty fitting conclusion.

Despite the themes, the book is surprisingly light reading and has plenty of funny moments - the cringe drama, petty fights and callous mask-off moments between assorted loosely-related people as they wait with bated breath for beloved babushka to finally croak and part with her inheritance show plenty of opportunities for morbid humor, the babushka herself is a riot, and watching the entire trainwreck in slow motion from Alexey's relatively detached POV is very entertaining.

Moving on to Impro sometime next year, as once shilled by Zvi. As an unfettered cringelord amateur actor back in high school who now heavily struggles with creative pursuits like writing, roleplaying and DMing, my expectations are high.

Less than a hundred pages from the end of Speaker for the Dead. Still can't really say I'm loving it, and certainly I'm not enjoying it half as much as I did its predecessor.

I have a copy of The Children of Men which I've never read, but I've seen the film adaptation several times and (one major plot hole aside) loved it. Well worth checking out. I believe the author gave it her seal of approval.

I finished Stranger In A Strange Land earlier this week, as I mentioned at one point in last week's SSQS thread. So now I'm on to the other book I picked up at the same time, an anthology of short stories by Harlan Ellison. Overall I have found it to be quite good, though I strongly recommend against getting the specific volume I got (a Barnes and Noble edition called "Greatest Hits"). First, B&N put a sticker on the cover that I didn't notice until after I got it home and ditched the receipt, and it left glue residue when I peeled it off. Second, it is tainted in places by the Current Year - there's a content warning saying that the stories have offensive thinking about women and minorities, and some editor thought it would be acceptable to change Ellison's text to say "Black" instead of "black" when referring to a character's ethnicity. Honestly, I would return it if I hadn't immediately thrown out the receipt, because editing an author's work after the fact like that is downright offensive. But c'est la vie.

For the actual content of the stories themselves, they are good (which is no surprise considering the author). I bought the book because it contained I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream (which I had never read), and I thought it deserved all the praise it gets. But surprisingly, I found "Repent, Harlequin" Said The Ticktockman (which I had not heard of) to steal the show thus far. The story is a classic sci-fi story type, the cautionary tale. It shows a version of humanity where society is so far in service to keeping a schedule that the tool of a clock has become a tyrant over humanity. I don't want to talk too much about it because it is a short story (only perhaps 30 pages), so it would be pretty easy to give the whole thing away. But I thought that Ellison does a great job of introducing the world, setting up a story that the reader cares about, and resolving said story in an effective way, all within a very short format. It is a really great bit of writing and I'm glad I got exposed to it even though it's not what I originally purchased the book for.

Reading George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four for the third time.

My first time was in high school in the 90’s, where mostly it was Newspeak that impacted me. I’d just finished Rush Limbaugh’s two current affairs books, and the trickery of politicians changing words to “politically correct” variants was my takeaway.

My second read was during the first Trump administration, where the shock of the totalitarian state of IngSoc/Airstrip One/Oceania and the geopolitics of Goldstein’s book made me look at current affairs in a new light, especially during the Biden/Covid years.

This third time through, the small details of Winston’s life are hitting me hard. He’s 44 or 45, a few years younger than me, and his constant mentions of physical problems punctuate the existential misery of his life in the lower rungs of the Party.

He’s married but separated, a fact I’d forgotten. I haven’t yet reached the parts detailing his love affair. I also hadn’t remembered his furtive writing of a diary where he introduced the idea that freedom is the ability to say that two plus two equals four, giving [spoiler] the perfect tool to break him in the end.

Contrasted with the other big dystopias I’ve read (The Hunger Games’ Panem, Brave New World’s ultracivilization, Atlas Shrugged’s crippled Communist America, and Harry Potter’s Voldemort’s Magical Britain), the world system in 1984 feels the most hopeless, the most capable of keeping heroes from arising, the most terrible to live under — and yet somehow, the most realistic and likely, with certain aspects already showing up in America’s coastal capitals.

Orwell was a communist. He wrote about what he knew and observed directly. This lends him the ability to describe the bleakness more realistically. Though he was a Western communist, so he hadn't experienced the full measure of what totalitarianism could do to a person and a society.

It’s incredible how Orwell wrote something which, no matter one’s political affiliation, candidly describes one’s outgroup.

I dunno. There's stuff you can pin on any authoritarian regime, but it clearly resembles some ideologies more than others. I think it had a pretty specific inspiration as well.

More than one, certainly.

I do not believe that the kind of society I describe will necessarily arrive, but I believe (allowing, of course, for the fact that the book is a satire) that something resembling it could arrive...[it is] a show...[of the] perversions to which a centralised economy is liable and which have already been partly realisable in communism and fascism.

Dude hated the Soviet Union; he was also pretty unhappy with getting bombed for years.

I think I recall reading something about how the "we have always beem at war with Eastasia" bit was inspired by his experience of the infighting between the Republican factions in the Spanish Civil War.

Wikipedia says it was inspired by the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, but I’d believe that too.

I really need to read Homage to Catalonia.

What a lot of people never learn is how much the modern imperial states (Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, FDR’s USA, the Soviet Union and Communist China) resembled each other, differing mostly in how their philosophers describe them and how much (and how often) their governments are perceived to be allowed to violate their citizens’ and enemies’ human rights.

The opposite of libertarian isn’t communism, it’s totalitarianism.

Much like Moldbug’s “demotism,” that model sounds dramatic, but doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. The bits which resemble each other are not the ones with explanatory power.

If nothing else, the U.S. comes out way ahead on body count. We have a distinct lack of Holocaust or Holodomor or Great Leap Forward. Surely that reflects a difference in methodology.

FDR’s USA

Interesting how the wiki entry for the National Industrial Recovery Act makes no reference to fascism despite it being part of FDR and the brain trust's inspiration for the act.

Man, fascism used to be hip and happening.

Where can I read more about this? None of the related articles have anything to say on the subject.

Where can I read more about this? None of the related articles have anything to say on the subject.

Various critics were deriding FDR as fascist within his first year in office, yet that NIRA article mentions none of it. Herbert Hoover was a prominent critic and wrote 2 anti-New Deal books in 1934 and 1936 specifically pointing out the parallels.

In the part about critics from the left:

Richard Hofstadter noted that critics from the left believed "that the NRA was a clear imitation of Mussolini's corporate state".[35]

There is this line in the criticism of FDR article:

John P. Diggins found only superficial similarities between the New Deal and Italian fascism. However, Diggins produced some quotations indicating that Roosevelt was interested in fascist economic programs and admired Mussolini.[49]

Footnote 49:

Early in 1933, Roosevelt told a White House correspondent: "I don't mind telling you in confidence that I am keeping in fairly close touch with that admirable Italian gentleman". In June 1933, Roosevelt wrote to Ambassador Breckinridge Long in Italy about Mussolini: "There seems no question that he is really interested in what we are doing and I am much interested and deeply impressed by what he has accomplished and by his evidenced honest purpose of restoring Italy and to prevent general European trouble". John P. Diggins. Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (1972). Princeton University Press. pp. 279–281.

I haven't read the book by Diggins, but it sounds interesting.

This article by Codevilla talks about it some, but he doesn't cite sources.

I'd have to say that The Children of Men feels both more realistic and hopeless to me (and also The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster). Although I suppose both end on a somewhat hopeful note: I have seen the hills of Wessex, as Ælfred saw them when he overthrew the Dane.

Having finished Reverend Insanity for the second time, I'm left with the same void in my soul.

Of course, the easiest solution was to seek out something by the same author, Gu Zhen Ren. He wrote two other novels since RI was banned, Infinite Bloodcore (points for the name, negative points for being left unfinished) and Mysteries of the Immortal Puppet Master.

I opted for the latter, initially, I felt lukewarm on it, but I know that in Xianxia, you don't judge books by their covers, or their first 50 chapters. Yup, sure enough, it became very clear that it's a Gu Zhen Ren novel after all. The protagonist is... callous, if not as ruthless as Fang Yuan. Maybe his little nephew. There are plots within plots, excellent attention to detail, and heart wrenching stories about seemingly insignificant characters. It has the majority of my attention, even if the edges are sanded down a tad bit to reduce the risk of another ban. GZR himself stated that it's a more "mass-market" novel, with a more standard Cultivation setting. It's still pretty solid so far.

Others on my reading shelf:

  • The Simoqin Prophecy by Amit Basu. The first of a trilogy. It's my second go at them, I heartily enjoyed the first. The easiest way to describe it is Indian Discworld, with clear inspiration from Pratchett. It is often ridiculously funny, while being poignant, but I'm afraid that a significant amount of the charm is lost on Western audiences. I could swear that 70% of the character and place names are references outsiders won't get, be they incredibly dumb puns or allusions to wider Hindu mythology. You'd probably need ChatGPT to let you in on the joke.
  • Kim Stanley Robinson's The Year of Rice and Salt. I fucking hated Aurora, and I'm the process of writing a full review, but while this novel is supposedly mid, it has an interesting premise with an AU setting where the Black Death absolutely rekt Europe (even more than it did in actual history, of course).
  • I was supposed to read Claude Shannon's A Mathematical Model of Communication for an ACX book club meeting. I was too lazy to do so, went in, claimed I knew a little bit about Game Theory, was embarrassed to find out that an actual PhD in the topic was present, and then unembarrased myself by actually making (IMO) good points. I do actually know a reasonable amount, especially when it comes to practical applications such as in military history. I might have another essay in the oven on that particular topic.

I haven't read Years of Rice and Salt since I was about 16, but I remember absolutely loving it. It is an interesting exploration of reincarnation and of how "locked in" a lot of history seems to have been. It also inspired me to do an Iroquois mega-campaign in Eu4/vic2, which you will understand when you've read the book.

I also have this on my bookshelf (it's been checked out of the library for ages), so perhaps we can agree to read it September and discuss?

Sounds good! Your endorsement makes me inclined to give it a proper shot.

Era of total intel agency control (CIA over America)? [schizo warning]

I'm a follower of one Russian youtuber whose ideas are apparently like this. In the feudal age, the elite was changing itself in constantly bloodletting of civil strife. In the absolutist age, the remaining nobility could still kill the king/emperor, and eventually in the French and Russian revolutions the entire class was exterminated. This has led to what is today a democratic system where the president and ministers are superficially interchangeable but decide nothing because they're all controlled by intel services from behind the scenes with pedophile porn blackmail on every statesman.

What would your thoughts be on such a model? For the evidence, he points to how brutal the war in the Ukraine is, but Putin and Trump are both chums with each other. And how Russia could easily destroy the Dnieper bridges in the Ukraine, but chooses not to - apparently forbidden by the CIA/KGB intel service to disarm Russia for a NATO invasion.

Other cases of collusion between different statesmen for the sole purpose of advancing the interests of the compromised and cancer-ridden American state would be:

  1. Yugoslavia's Miloshevich who signed the Dayton agreement in 1995 leading to a surrender in 1999;
  2. Syria's Assad with the Astana accords in 2021 with deescalation zones for the rebels which allowed them to regroup and strike back in 2024;
  3. Iran's ayatollah who allowed both the Hamas and Hezbollah to be destroyed peacemeal without helping them;
  4. Russia's Putin who has only ever attacked in the only fortified region of the front for 3.5 years and is now trying to sign another rotten peace deal.

I'm likely sounding really silly right now, I'm downgrading myself to the Russian parts of my brain when talking about this. In English, it would likely be called "conspiracy theory"? But isn't the role of the CIA kinda common knowledge these days? And my question is about how WIAH never ever mentions it. Of course, there's another question as to how much any elite can control (and/or engineer?) a society without it breaking apart. According to some, the fall of the USSR was a controlled demolition, too.

Another aspect of his ideas is that America infected with the CIA finds China its enemy because China lacks the intelligence agencies and mercilessly culls its elite preventing corruption and is thus impervious to being infected itself. This is why America needs to start a nuclear war with China, but before that destroy the Russian nuclear arsenal - which is exactly what Putin is doing (alongside useless projects such as Poseidon, Avangard and Oreshnik or nuclear icebreakers).

Another blogger whom I follow has said that the Krokus terror attack involved a Russian policeman cutting off a terrorist's ear, and that it happened on Purim where cookies are baked in the form of ears (oznei haman), thus linking to a ritualistic significance. This line of thinking would view the Ukraine war not as disarming Russia but more in the way of religious slaughter (because again, destroying the Dnieper bridges or going around Donbass are never even considered by the Russians).

Again, apologies for copious schizo, but nothing of this can even be found in the Anglosphere. All you have is either the liberals saying Trump is Putin's slave, or the Z-anon bloggers such as MacGregor, Ritter, Napolitano, Mearsheimer or Jeffrey Sachs claiming Putin is playing 4D chess. Russians overall are at least diverse in their views, but I don't see any critique of their models.

This has led to what is today a democratic system where the president and ministers are superficially interchangeable but decide nothing because they're all controlled by intel services from behind the scenes with pedophile porn blackmail on every statesman.

Well, Trump actually has pedophile porn blackmail on himself, and everyone knows it, but he seems to be getting along pretty well. I think the truth is a bit more mundane than that- there's simply no pressure to do anything effective outside of the inertia of conservatism bureaucracy, so it just drifts that way. Even though those in the bureaucracy might be empowered to make decisions, the question of what decisions to make becomes difficult, so "advance the kingdom of Jesus [or his modern equivalent, LGBTesus]" becomes the default.

The trick about the American state is that they legitimately are both competent and significant enough on the world stage for that competence to be meaningful, unlike every other state except for maybe Russia, China, and I guess France.

mercilessly culls its elite preventing corruption and is thus impervious to being infected itself

The US doesn't need a service to do this, mostly for HBD reasons. The thing the US population (this is an English heritage thing) is easily corrupted by are the promise of 51% attacks, where half the society + 1 person forces their own corruption on the other half minus one. It's "democracy", you see- and the demos is just as corruptible as the kings and nobles of old (which is why people who know they're doing wrong hide behind "but The People make the rules"). BLM is a particularly salient example of this. So is Brexit, for that matter.

As for 'schizo nonsense', this is the Russian political MO and has been since at least Tsar Alexander, if those Historia Civilis videos are at all accurate. He doesn't actually understand this (due to having a particular/modern political bias), but openly absurd and inconsistent bluster and back-channeling and threats of force and just bog standard J. Jonah Jameson-ing is just kind of how these guys work. It's an unstable stability, if that makes any sense.

The obfuscation the Russians employ is that you can't even figure out what their kind of dishonesty actually is. If you can predict the manner of a man's dishonesty (or more properly, his interests), you can plan for and bargain with and manage him. It makes sense, then, that confusing how others would predict the manner in which you will be dishonest today could be a valid negotiating strategy.

It makes sense that Trump, being accustomed to that style of negotiation, would find it easier to work with a person whose entire concept of statecraft is (by some geographical-social necessity) basically just that, in contrast to his own empire's provinces who negotiate in that stereotypically feminine way where everyone pretends they don't have authority over anything (to say nothing of the Chinese, who have 2000 more years of experience in that negotiation strategy).

I’ll give you the straight european-liberal view: the diversity of russian views (and your own) is largely schizo nonsense, partly fomented by putin himself , to keep his subjects and potential opponents confused, disunited, apolitical and demoralized.

he points to how brutal the war in the Ukraine is, but Putin and Trump are both chums with each other.

Putin supports the brutality because he believes what he says he believes – ‘brother peoples’, old historic and not-so old grievances and insults, the necessary greatness of russia, etc – that stuff’s more important to him than countless dead russians, to say nothing of ukrainians.

Trump likes putin personally; in particular, his appearance of strength and his long-held authoritarian power. And, you know, trump’s people aren’t dying in ukraine, he genuinely does not care or need to care all that much about foreigners killing each other.

And how Russia could easily destroy the Dnieper bridges in the Ukraine, but chooses not to - apparently forbidden by the CIA/KGB intel service to disarm Russia for a NATO invasion.

Even if they could destroy them, they probably think they’ll get them in a settlement, or use them for the big push when the ukrainians collapse, as they were always supposed to.

Russians are a lot weaker than they think they are. At the bottom, their ‘inexplicable’ failure to win manifests in conspiracy theories like yours. At the top, they cling to hope of a total victory long after its potential benefits have been exceeded by the horrendous costs of the war.

Russia's Putin who has only ever attacked in the only fortified region of the front for 3.5 years and is now trying to sign another rotten peace deal.

? They tried attacking everything at first, no?

happened on Purim where cookies are baked in the form of ears (oznei haman), thus linking to a ritualistic significance. This line of thinking would view the Ukraine war not as disarming Russia but more in the way of religious slaughter

OK that's just complete cuckoo.

destroying the Dnieper bridges

One explanation is that destroying them isn't that easy. You need to destroy at least one of the pylons to render them non-operational, fixing the spans is relatively straightforward. Ukraine also has several dams across the Dnieper, which are even harder to damage and would flood several large cities if destroyed. Drowning thousands of civilians is bad optics.

Also if I'm not mistaken, when one is invading a country one desires the bridges in territory that one has not yet conquered to be intact -- not that Russia is probably planning another trans-Dnieper adventure anytime soon, but I'm sure there a war-plan for it somewhere that would be made a lot easier by having some non-blown-up bridges available to supply whatever beachhead they might like to establish.

A few updates. The bloggers in question are Strateg Divannogo Legiona (aka Sofa Legion Strategist) on YouTube, also NeoFeudal Review and Slavland Chronicles (aka Rolo Slavskiy / Rurik Skywalker) on Substack.

Mind you, what Stateg is saying (Dnieper bridges, Donbass assaults) is overall a widely accepted truth in Russia (judging by such personalities as Igor Strelkov and Maxim Kalashnikov, probably others). But it's completely absent from the Anglosphere because America has a total information blackout, with both parties serving the same centre (liberals saying Putin is satan, and paid CIA shills saying Putin is a Russian patriot angelic Christian warrior). There are some differences with Strelkov conceding that Putin may be a rusty nail - rotten but the only thing keeping Russia from a bloody civil war. Whereas Strateg says Putin is intentionally disarming Russia for a NATO invasion.

All in all, if the war is fake theatrics to a significant extent, it puts in question the entire presuppositions about the currently existing civilisations. Maybe it's being used as a bogeyman to scare the EU into rearming. Maybe it's used to genocide the Slavs. Maybe America intends to capture the Russian nuclear arsenal intact to use against China. Maybe America wants to destroy Russia because Russia is China's nuclear shield (and China for whatever reason isn't increasing its own stockpile).

Whereas Strateg says Putin is intentionally disarming Russia for a NATO invasion.

This is hilarious. But I hope whoever that fine specimen of humanity is, he's not in Russia, or hides well, because Putin's oprichniks does not care which place you criticize it from, be it from the right, from the left or from the depths of derangement only accessible to a devoted Lovecraftian. The mere fact of criticizing the Boss is enough. Girkin got how much, 4 years I think? I am not sure I will be sad when that specimen is declared Foreign Agent and shut down too, but I would probably prefer it to continue to exist - somewhere far, far away from me - as a proof that the Universe is capable of producing more wonders that I would ever be able to comprehend.

All in all, if the war is fake theatrics

Anything can be derived from a false premise.

I'm sorry, is my post breaking any rules? Or is it merely still held for moderation?

The latter, I think.

How often do you get to perform a notable good deed? Not just putting back a shopping cart, but something worthy of being a least a story about your day? Examples for scale:

A few months ago, I was hiking and happened upon a damsel in distress. A woman had fallen over and couldn't get up. She didn't seem seriously injured, more ungraceful and bruised, but she was struggling to get back up. I helped her to her feet and then escorted her back to the entrance to the park.

A few weeks ago, I was in a Walmart when I was stopped by a very short Hispanic man. He pointed up towards the top shelf and said, in an oddly Italian-sounding accent, "Can you please reach for me? I am too eh-small." I helped him, exchanged a quick pleasantry, and went on my day.

A few days ago, coming home from the same Walmart on an unlit back road, I nearly ruined my month. A tree had fallen across my half of the road. It was long dead and trimmed, leaving it like a telephone-pole sized spiked club. It was partially hidden by poor lighting, a curve, and a hill, and I came within a few feet of doing thousands of dollars of damage to my car. I managed to spot it in time, went around, and then I parked just past it, got out of the car, and hauled the tree out of the road.

With that act, it feels quite possible that I saved some nameless stranger from large expenses and hours of stress. I'll never know who, or if. But doing that felt good. Prosocial. Made me feel strong and competent.

But the real reward was getting to tell the story to my dad. I wound him up with expectations before revealing that I did not fuck up my car. And I got to see, when I mentioned picking up a tree and moving it, a flash of pride on his face at his son's casual might.

A flash of pride that I am reliving by telling the story now. And it occurs to me that this perk is probably a critical mechanism for inspiring people to do random, notable good deeds. And as a man who usually prefers his social invisibility, having one of these stories to tell is one of the rare times I'm happy to draw attention to myself. So.

What was your most recent good deed? Your greatest? And how does your willingness to preform them vary with how much social accolades you expect from people around you?

On Halloween I was coming home from the pub at maybe 10 or 11 pm when I happened on a girl who'd passed out on the street after having too much to drink. I immediately realised she needed to get to a hospital to have her stomach pumped, so I called an ambulance and put her on her side in case she was sick. Her two friends called me a pervert and accused me of groping her, then left, abandoning her to her fate. Because of the occasion, I had to wait somewhere in the region of three hours for an ambulance to arrive. At least some other passers-by stopped to help, including two nurses in training. A day or two later the girl texted me to thank me and said she was cutting ties with the two friends who'd abandoned her.

In July I went into my local cornershop, in which a customer was accusing the staff of short-changing him (I assume he was mistaken). He attempted to climb over the counter to assault them, whereupon I stepped in to put him in a half-nelson and drag him out of the shop. He feebly attempted to attack me before being dissuaded by his (I assume extremely embarrassed) girlfriend and slouching off in defeat. The staff were very grateful and made a point to thank me when I came into the shop over the following few days. Another patron came up to me immediately afterwards and quipped that I was in the wrong line of work and ought to become a bouncer.

A few weeks ago, my parents were flying back from Australia, and I offered to drive them home from the airport as I knew they'd be jet-lagged. When we got to the car, my mother, God love her, offered to drive. I very gently pointed out that the sole reason I was there was to save her the trouble of having to drive.

When we got to the car, my mother, God love her, offered to drive. I very gently pointed out that the sole reason I was there was to save her the trouble of having to drive.

To be fair, I assume the main reason they took you up on the offer was to see you.

Her two friends called me a pervert and accused me of groping her, then left, abandoning her to her fate.

Wow. This is one of those stories you don't believe if you read it on facebook, but I trust you. Terrible behavior.

They are so much worse in combination.

  • Leaving your passed out friend behind is terrible.
  • Making baseless accusations that someone's a groping pervert is terrible.
  • Leaving your passed-out friend behind with a pervert who was groping her???? No shit she cut ties.

Where does "good deed" end and "codependent sucker prone to being taken advantage of by friends" begin? I've struggled with the latter in life.

That aside, depending on if we're counting friends or just strangers the most recent one was either giving a friend a few hundred bucks to help with immigration paperwork (She's been here for over 30 years but has been stuck in some kafkaesque green card renewal Hell since Biden was in office.) or driving a drunk guy home from the bar I'm a regular at. The latter can turn into a shitshow if they're too belligerent to cooperate or too impaired to give directions but the man in question was just irritated that the bartender didn't want to let him drive, knew where he lived, and it was a short drive. I got a free shot for my trouble and was able to do the bartender (a dear friend of mine) an easy favor.

My greatest deed doubles as a hilariously over the top act of simping. A woman I was very much in love with at the time and who was also crashing on my couch wrecked her car driving to my place, clipped a parked vehicle and ripped one of the wheels off the car. She was just about to pay the thing off and I didn't have the heart to have it towed to her mom's place knowing it would never get fixed and she'd wind up back at the beginning of the "buy here, pay here" treadmill so I said "fuck it", had it towed to my place, and all but rebuilt the front end of her car over the next few weeks. In total I replaced both lower ball joints, tie rod ends, and sway bar links (What wasn't damaged was worn out junk anyway and the parts kit was cheaper than I expected so I just bought the kit.) along with one hub/knuckle assembly, CV axle, strut, and a fender badly spraypainted to match (The latter set of parts were sourced from a friendly local junkyard.). It wasn't perfect (The subframe was either bent or just badly out of alignment due to the wreck/repair.) but I got it to drive straight enough and the repairs lasted the rest of the car's life.

My take on helping people is that if I can I should, within reason. It took me a long time and a lot of money/free labor to learn the "within reason" part. It also took a long time to learn that doing nice things for people in hopes of being liked isn't going to fix not feeling particularly likeable.

My take on helping people is that if I can I should

I used to feel the same. I don't anymore, but I used to.

It took me a long time and a lot of money/free labor to learn the "within reason" part

Amen. I never did it in the hope of being liked. I did it because I wasn't doing anything else with my time so why not pitch in. I stopped doing it because I reached the conclusion that doing nothing and losing nothing was preferable to helping people and ending up worse off, plus getting lined up to be volunteered to have the process repeat.

The last time I did a good deed worth talking about post resolution was when me and my gf at the time found a pair of debilitatingly intoxicated students in the park around midnight so I called a taxi and gave the driver £20 to take them home. They, a boy and a girl, were half naked and had just crawled out of a large water-filled ditch together. God knows what they'd been doing but it was clearly not working out and it was time to call it a night. When the taxi arrived the girl complained that she didn't want to share the taxi with the boy so I let her know that she could either deal with it or resume searching for her shoes. She wisely decided she'd deal with it.

In that instance I was pretty confident that I wouldn't become jaded from repeatedly encountering the same situation.

I have been hermiting it up big time since getting back to Australia, and mowing my neighbour's lawn doesn't really count since I do it all the time, but I had the opportunity to do a good deed for someone the last day I was in Osaka - an old lady at the subway station dropped her umbrella and didn't realise it. She was so cute, like the platonic ideal of a little Japanese grandma, and she almost jumped out of her skin when I tapped her shoulder and she turned to see me looming over her. Then she double checked her bag like I was playing the old 'pretend someone dropped their umbrella and give them a second identical umbrella' prank on her. Then when she she realised I was being sincere she transformed from reserved and slightly suspicious to joyous gushing and appreciation, grabbing my arm and thanking me like I just pulled her off the tracks before a train arrived. The way people in Japan transform from mostly affectless to hyper animated when you break through the social conditioning is so much fun as an outsider.

Drove my roommate to the airport and will be picking him up tonight. Wrote a training plan for a friend for the Baltimore marathon.

Not terribly often, but sometimes. Just helped a friend move last weekend (though I did get some old books and a sweet radio that I will likely never use any more than he did). I've probably done bigger good deeds than this one but it sticks with me: I was staying at my aunt's place in a third-world country where she rents out flats. Some elderly regulars were visiting, and the man was in very poor health, clearly not going to be around to come back next year. One day I'm walking out of the vestibule as he's walking in, and he suddenly starts to collapse, I'm in arms reach to dart in and prop him up. He's a big, portly guy but I'm strong enough to hold him up, my brother gets in on the other side and we slowly walk him over to a stair where we can sit him down safely. At that age, in that poor health, and with the issues of the local hospitals, a bad fall would likely either have killed him or meant the end of his mobile life. There's also something particularly satisfying about being able to help somebody just by being there and being physically strong/quick, primal male stuff.

I almost never do good deeds. This is my chief complaint about welfare statism. Virtue has been abdicated to the state- you can’t really be charitable because everyone is looked after. You can’t really be brave because everything is safe. Social atomization (arguably also a consequence of statism) makes it hard even to help someone move a couch because they don’t want to “bother you.” This makes practicing active virtues really had and makes real friendship really hard, because there is so little need for you to help anyone; friendship has been reduced to hanging out.

When life was harder, we needed each other a lot more. That doing one good deed makes us think of “accolades” is a sign of how weird the current situation is. I once got a call in the middle of the night to bring gas to a guy who had run out and I was SO happy. That was like 7 years ago. Ask people for more! Give them the chance to be virtuous!

Whereabouts do you live, if you don't mind my asking?

Western hemisphere.

I suppose a perk of medicine is that I get in my good deed quota on a daily basis, while getting paid for it. I tried offering first aid to a lady lying in the middle of the street (and somehow also holding on to a wooden chair of unknown origin), but the local security shooed me away after confirming paramedics were enroute. I think she was drunk, concussed or both. I also hold open doors, and I gave a hot woman her expensive looking scarf back when it fell out of her bag.

(Her being hot had nothing to do with it, I'd have done it for anyone without an obvious, contagious dermatological illness)

Now that I note that you also asked about "greatest" good deeds, well, I did talk at least 3 people out of commiting suicide, outside of my capacity as a psychiatrist.

Yeah, as a doctor your day job is often going to qualify as "helping someone", at least by the prompt. Out of work examples would fit the bill, or times you went above and beyond for a patient, enough that you would want to brag about it to coworkers.

When I was a teenager, I suffered a bizarre injury to my eye. I had to take some kind of medicine to keep the pressure down, but I got the flu at the same time, and couldn't keep the medicine down. And the optomitrist who was taking care of me made freaking house calls. In his Porche, in the snow to come check on me, every day for a week, until he decided I needed surgery, and then he did the surgery.

It's been 25 years and my family still talks about the lengths that man went to to save my eye.

An optometrist helped diagnose me with an autoimmune disease. I had been having eye pain for a week or so, went to see a generalist who half-assedly assumed it was a bacterial conjunctivitis, prescribed me antibiotics which only made my eye feel worse. I looked for an emergency optometrist, the one that had appointments on shorter notice was in a small but fancy glasses store downtown. Went there, the optometrist checked my eye and she diagnosed it as a uveitis instead. Started me on steroid drops that helped, but then she asked me questions about stuff that seemed unrelated, like do I often get back pain. Is it at rest or from exercise that I get back pain. Indeed, I had been having back pain for years, that physiotherapist have been trying unsuccessfully to help me with.

Turns out having a uveitis was atypical at my age and in my condition, so she suspected there must have been more. She had me check with an ophtalmologist that specialises in uveitis, who then referred me to a rheumatologist and ayuup, I have ankylosing spondilitis.

Sure, the optometrist helped me by "merely" doing her job well, but to be honest she could have just treated the uveitis and I would never have thought that she had been negligent.

I don’t know if this counts but I was really drunk with my buddy on the beach during a hurricane and we went swimming. The waves were literally on the walk way of the beach - he jumped in and immediately was flipped and went head first down disappeared. I vaguely sort of waddled in where I thought he may have been, grabbed him, and pulled him out.

He was sort of stunned and non verbal.

The issue is: I know something like this happened. But I don’t remember anything else before or after. I don’t know how heroic I was, and if my mind is remembering more and more heroic feats in that moment. It was some 20 years ago and we were drunk and it was way late at night.

But I do know that he got in the ocean and I had to get him. And if my mind is adding a bit of extra flair, so be it, I’m 6ft5 and it’s believable even to myself.

Also I was really stupid around that time so it all checks out.

Last year a lady kept fainting at a WWII reenactment and I was like the only person to grab her and put her on the ground gently and give her water. She was very fat and old and so was her husband. It was really good seeing my two teenage boys seeing me do that. Like, hey, you gotta do good things rather than staying neutral.

As a responsible, frugal, young, male driver witnessing the Decline of America, I would be utterly fucked without UMPD coverage, which is extremely valuable and necessary so I don't have to empty my emergency fund every time someone's juvenile delinquent runs a red light; but Collision and Comprehensive are just plain negative-value since their premiums have to be high enough to include the amortized cost of said delinquent replacing his own car also. (Before you ask: Liability is its own thing; I don't mind paying for that.)

I've contacted 5+ insurers trying to purchase an auto insurance package that includes UMPD without Collision, and they all alleged that Alabama bans the sale of UMPD-without-Collision. Most also claimed that Alabama is nearly unique in this.

However, I couldn't find any such law on the books, or any historic arguments/rationale behind the (alleged) Alabama status quo.

What the fuck am I missing? And what due diligence should I do before I start trying to get my state rep to fix this shit?

EDIT: to be clear, my vehicle is not financed; I am the unencumbered owner. Insurers are happy to sell me an Auto insurance plan that has neither UMPD nor Collision ("Liability-only", or Liability+UMBI if I want my hospital OOP covered), which would be significantly cheaper. But having such a plan screwed me over last time.

And if it were just 1 insurance company that said "uhh it's state law or whatever", I'd easily write it off as just a lazy, poorly-trained T1 rep lying to get the customer looking for something they don't sell off the phone (and blaming "the government" has a nicer ring than blaming "company policy" or "our underwriters" anyway.)

In fact, that's what I did assume, for the first few companies I called... but by the time I got to the sixth, and they all gave the same answer in perfectly clear terms (*sans the actual citation), and several of the reps elaborated that Alabama was somehow special (USAA rep said there's only "one or two states where that has been the case"), I had to concede that they might not just be bullshitting me.

UPDATE: just got this nonsensical reply from the Alabama Department of Insurance Consumer Affairs division:

> Is there any law or regulation in Alabama that forbids insurers from offering UMPD coverage outside of a Collision policy? If so, what is the citation?
>
> I ask because I have tried to buy UMPD coverage from 6 different insurers so far (USAA, Progressive, GEICO, State Farm, Liberty Mutual, and AAA), and every one has claimed that Alabama law forbids them from offering UMPD outside of a full Collision policy. Most of them additionally claimed that Alabama was an extremely strange case, and that they are allowed to sell UMPD without full Collision just about everywhere else in the country.

Alabama law does not explicitly forbid insurers from offering Uninsured Motorist Property Damage (UMPD) coverage outside of a Collision policy. However, the law does require insurers to offer [UMBI] coverage as part of any auto liability policy, which includes Collision coverage. This means that while insurers can offer UMPD coverage separately, it must be part of the Collision policy, which is a type of liability coverage that covers damages to your own vehicle.

Current draft of a response:

Thank you for the reply!

I don't quite understand your reply, though; it seems to contradict itself:

> "Alabama law does not explicitly forbid insurers from offering Uninsured Motorist Property Damage (UMPD) coverage outside of a Collision policy."
> "while insurers can offer UMPD coverage separately, it must be part of the Collision policy, which is a type of liability coverage that covers damages to your own vehicle."

Could you confirm what specific law or regulation is behind the second point there?

Why, exactly, is it illegal for Alabama auto insurers to sell me UMPD (which I want) if I don't also buy a Collision policy (which I do not want)?

I'm confused. Are you regularly getting into accidents? It is definitely never worth the cost to get insurance for something that regularly happens. Insurance is for things that will probably never happen in your life.

Losing your car to an uninsured hooligan sucks a lot, disrupts your whole life, and happens once in a blue moon. It's happened once so far to me, and has happened multiple times to almost every responsible adult I know. Even if there must always be some "house edge", I'm wanting UMPD coverage just to take the edge off the impact to my life.

What I resent is paying the additional premiums for full Collision coverage which also "insures" me against my own irresponsibility, at a premium based on the responsibility of my demographic peers. Even if there were 0 house edge, that's still a bad bet for me because of the massive behavioral component.

What do you mean by "losing your car"? Are you saying everyone you know has totalled their car multiple times to an uninsured hooligan? I don't think I know very many people who have totalled their car for any reason. Personally, I have never been in an accident that did more than damage a bumper.

Even if this is your situation, it doesn't make sense to buy insurance for something you expect to happen a few times in your life. Savings and loans are tools that already exist to even out the expense over your lifetime. Insurance adds an unnecessary cost to this.

Now, if you are unusually prone to getting into accidents and your insurer doesn't know that, then it makes sense, but this averse selection is exactly why it wouldn't make sense for most people.

He's being forced to insure the value of his own car even though (presumably) he is prepared to replace it out of pocket in the event of an accident. If the car is paid off this is an entirely plausible problem.

He's being forced to insure the value of his own car

No! That is not the case. Per my original post, I'm only being forced to buy Collision coverage if I buy UMPD coverage in Alabama:

I've contacted 5+ insurers trying to purchase an auto insurance package that includes UMPD without Collision, and they all alleged that Alabama bans the sale of UMPD-without-Collision.

Every insurance company is happy to sell me a plan that only includes Liability and (at my option) UM/UIM and Medical; and several reps commented they'd be happy to sell me UMPD-without-Collision if I were to move out of Alabama.

(presumably) he is prepared to replace it out of pocket in the event of an accident

That's exactly it. I'm happy to eat rice and beans for 6 months to rebuild the emergency fund if I break my car due to my own stupidity (which is the risk that Collision coverage defrays), but I'll be damned to do it again because local deadbeat Micahal Rayshone Taylor was driving effectively uninsured because his worthless mother lied to the insurance company about who regularly drives the car (which is the risk that UMPD coverage defrays).

In the latter case, I'm not a squillionare yet so reducing the variance is still worth the middleman's fee; but every insurer claims that Alabama law forces them to bundle these coverages together. But I couldn't find such a law (and obviously the insurance reps don't know shit), so I'm trying to figure out what exactly I need to ask my Alabama State Legislature rep to do.

I guess what I'm confused by is why people have emergency funds. Why not just spend your regular savings or use a line of credit and slowly pay it off, spreading the cost out over a longer period of time? Or if you need a new car, why not finance it?

why people have emergency funds[?] Why not just spend your regular savings[?]

I don't understand your confusion. What's the difference between those categories, in your mind?

Why not just…use a line of credit and slowly pay it off, spreading the cost out over a longer period of time? Or if you need a new car, why not finance it?

  1. Any car with a market value high enough that a bank would consider financing it is going to be depreciating at a rate I'm not comfortable being liable for.

  2. There will be interest, at rates likely higher than Ultrashort Treasury yields.

  3. If I want said interest payments to be less than ~11%, the financer will force me to purchase Collision coverage (and I remind you, avoiding purchasing this was the entire point of opening this thread in the first place.)

I don't understand your confusion. What's the difference between those categories, in your mind?

The difference is that the emergency fund is something you feel the need to separate from your regular savings and refill by spending much less money while you do so. If you were spending your regular savings, you wouldn't let having to buy a new car change what you else you spend. The cost would be spread over decades or even generations.

Any car with a market value high enough that a bank would consider financing it is going to be depreciating at a rate I'm not comfortable being liable for.

I don't know what you mean by being liable for depreciation.

There will be interest, at rates likely higher than Ultrashort Treasury yields.

But less than the expected rate of return of the S&P 500.

If I want said interest payments to be less than ~11%, the financer will force me to purchase Collision coverage (and I remind you, avoiding purchasing this was the entire point of opening this thread in the first place.)

This is higher than I would expect. I just got a call from a car dealer offering me about 4%. Maybe that's with insurance. This makes little sense. I can borrow at about 8% I believe from my unsecured line of credit. Why would the interest rate on a car, which is secured loan, be higher than that?

If interest rates are really that high, then maybe it's a bad idea to lease, but still, I don't see the logic in eating rice and beans for six months to recover the expense. You can spread it over your lifetime by just having less savings.

I know Texas state reps are happy to(have their staffers) research obscure state regulatory issues for constituents who call complaining about it, at least if you are a precinct chair in the same party.

I would suggest reaching out to local republican Apparatchiks to ask state legislators if they can find the regulation.

The first thing with any question about how you insure your vehicle is is the vehicle paid off, and if not what are the rules in place on how it is insured from the owner of the loan.

Yes, I am the unencumbered owner of the vehicle.

We're about to close escrow on a house. What are some fun things you can do with a house you own that you can't do with a house you rent? I'm specifically looking for ideas that small kids (ages 2-7) will find fun.

I'll mention that the people I know who raise chickens often complain about the challenges and costs. I wouldn't do it.

For decoration/wallpaper, one thing my parents did was cut out Calvin and Hobbes strips and use them as wallpaper. It was awesome. So: Be creative about what "wallpaper" means.

Building secret compartments in the house of a sort could be cool. Vaults in the drywall, for instance?

I love the concept of building forts etc. as well, huge part of my childhood.

As another commenter said, I think painting or wallpaper is going to be your best bet because this is the easiest DIY project and the most easily fixable if your kids make a mess. Other DIY projects are, while satisfying, not exactly fun.

Landscaping is a potentially good option, but I would have found gardening/landscaping as boring as watching paint dry when I was a kid.

Other ideas:

  • Wall mounting a TV
  • Pillow fort with wall hooks installed
  • Putting glow in the dark stars up on the kids ceiling
  • Installing new LED lights in the kids room (adhesive strip lighting is really cool even for adults lol)
  • Adding dimmers or other custom lighting. Be careful if you're going to do any electrical/outlet work.
  • Installing shelves
  • Setting up a woodworking/art studio if you now have a dedicated space or garage

Reading this list, I think the custom lighting would be a really fun one for the kids.

Also, you should ask ChatGPT!

Kids love digging holes. Whether that counts as actual landscaping, however...

As for an actual constructive suggestion, a treehouse or some other type of outdoors semi-permanent structure that would be impractical to install at a rental.

Treehouse is a great call

Pets! At some point in life, when your kids beg for a dog, actually say yes.

Keyless front door lock (like with a number code) is a spectacular lifesytle improvement. You will never lock yourself out, ever.

Otherwise, the acquisition of power tools and knowledge in order to not deal with ridiculously expensive and incompetent contractors is somewhat satisfying.

Painting rooms in fun colors seems like something the kids would enjoy a lot. Though you might want to be careful about making it very clear that them being able to put their mark on the wall is not an every day thing, lol.

Build a moat.

Gardening or light landscaping.

Raising chickens, if your zoning allows.

DIY home improvement projects that aren't structurally critical. Teach the kids how the permitting systems works (partially serious there).

If you have trees, you can install a small zipline.

Treehouse, or a similar small construction project that they can then manage and maintain. My friend had his kids build a small aquaponics system and they could grow whatever they wanted in it (aside from weed).

The landlord fears the outdoor (or indoor) chicken farmer.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


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