domain:streamable.com
oats_son
4hr ago
I'm not arguing that gaming crack never existed before today's time, I'm just trying to push back against "gaming's golden age ended decades ago" point. I like that there's good stuff in the 90s. I'm happy it mostly still exists for weirdos who want to play through the best stuff. I would be very sad to give up the more recent stuff in some hypothetical world where gaming was executed for writing crimes against humanity sometime in the mid 2010s, like I suspect some hardliners might want.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
4hr ago
To be fair wide is perfectly viable in Civ 5, I play that way myself. You will have a harder time in the early game (pro tip: settle cities on top of new luxuries so you get the happiness bonus immediately), but it's quite doable. Unless you're playing against humans, 4-city tradition is an optimization, not a necessity.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
4hr ago
Civ dates back to the early 90s, and Dwarf Fortress to the early 2000s. For another example, people used to get in trouble playing Doom at work because the game was just that good. There were very addictive games being made 20-30 years ago too.
Yeah, this case seems ridiculous on its face. But then, Trump is a ridiculous figure.
All that needed to happen , anywhere, was for someone else to have picked the "be fucking reasonable" option. Part of the reason I'm so contemptuous of the moralistic line is that people seemed to have gotten drunk on their own Koolaid and made everything worse.
ArmedTooHeavily
5hr ago
You're trying too hard, obvious bait is obvious.
Blueberry
5hr ago
If Zelensky were to make peace, he'd have to fight the nationalists who won't give up this easily
Isn’t that true for any Ukrainian President? How would a US replacement/puppet be accepted?
While Russia is currently winning, they are winning very very very slowly. The war can go on for a long time.
crushedoranges
5hr ago
The Chinese have a parochial and xenophobic term for foreigners of all stripes, 鬼佬 (Gweilo). literally 'ghoul man' or poetically, 'foreign devil'.
It is a useful term for an malevolent foreigner who intends you harm, who acts disingenuously with lies and deceit.
A man who asks you to define your self-worth by the good treatment of foreigners and not the consideration of your countrymen is definitely a 'foreign devil!'
Americans would be well advised to rectify this appropriate name for such individuals, and recognize such people as for who they are.
WhiningCoil
5hr ago
If it weren't for health insurance and my daughter with a chronic condition, I'd consider myself done. It's not a super bad chronic condition, mind you. Honestly it's barely an inconvenience we've gotten so used to it. But... it still exist and could theoretically rear it's ugly head in a major way.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
5hr ago
I’m not seeing the problem with Francophone. Vicky 3 starts in 1830, right? [At that time, t]hey’ve been doing business in French for longer than the U.S. has existed.
IMO, allowing Corsicans to have two different languages is unreasonable when other cultures do not get such an opportunity. It enables gamey behavior like playing as Germany, releasing the country of Corsica as a puppet, and granting to it both French land and Italian land. And it makes Corsicans more accepted by the French govt. than they should be.
For an analogous situation, look at the Ashkenazi culture. Realistically, Ashkenazi should speak German as well as Yiddish. But a comment in the game files explicitly notes that the German-Speaking trait was not given to the Ashkenazi in the game because it would increase their acceptance to an unrealistic degree.
Speaking of which—how likely is it that a pro/anti-slavery culture which has triggered a civil war actually would enact the relevant policy? I would expect it to be near 100%, which is presumably why Paradox hardcoded it. And are there other hardcoded war→policies?
Normally, the USA will be in the middle of enacting Slavery Banned, the CSA will secede rolled back to Legacy Slavery through the normal secession mechanic, and then the events will immediately force the USA into Slavery Banned and the CSA into Slave Trade. If the forced law changes are removed: It is possible but unlikely that a CSA politician with the Slaver ideology will enact Slave Trade. (Note that the Pro-Slavery ideology espoused by the CSA's Landowners interest group likes Slave Trade no more strongly than it likes Legacy Slavery, so without a special Slaver leader it will not go all the way to Slave Trade.) And it is possible but unlikely that the USA's in-progress natural law change to Slavery Banned will fail, causing it to keep Legacy Slavery.
Likewise, I imagine that a pro-slavery USA could enact Slave Trade, and then a seceding FSA could roll back only to Legacy Slavery rather than going all the way to Slavery Banned. But that's just speculation, as I haven't actually seen it happen.
If there are any other forced law changes, I haven't noticed them.
You’re going to have to explain what “incorporation” is supposed to represent if you want commentary on those.
Essentially, Victoria's "incorporated states" are the same as Europa Universalis's "core provinces" and Crusader Kings's "de jure subject titles". The people in incorporated states have to pay taxes, but also can vote and receive the benefits of govt. policies like schools and hospitals.
In the words of Wikipedia: "American territories are under American sovereignty and may be treated as part of the U.S. proper in some ways and not others (i.e., territories belong to, but are not considered part of the U.S.). Unincorporated territories in particular are not considered to be integral parts of the U.S., and the Constitution of the United States applies only partially in those territories."
hydroacetylene
5hr ago
Not at all implausible, assuming the language is Spanish, to just… go about life not using English in the USA. There’s plenty of Spanish-language services available and immigration services is used to speaking Spanish. It probably means languages aren’t the strong suit here, but not much else.
Completely normal. My mom has been in the US 30 years and she doesn't speak English. It helps that a lot of businesses are bilingual, and there are even some that are exclusively Spanish. For example, before the internet took over television, she could watch Univision and Telemundo. And, of course, South Florida is full of Hispanics, so she has plenty of other people to talk to.
My mom has tried to learn English, even taking classes at a local community college, but she failed. This is not surprising. Most people lose the ability to learn a new language after they become adults, and most people only have the intelligence to speak one language really well anyway.
From "Language is Culture" by Spandrell:
Mr. Lee held the popular idea that language was a zero-sum game? No, Mr. Lee understood the commonsensical idea that your brain has limited storage capacity. Like anything else. Your brain is made of atoms. It is not made of magic. It is not made of godly dust. It is a material thing. It is, in a sense, a container of information, and information takes space. It obviously does in computers; pray tell, NYT, why the brain should have infinite capacity? It doesn't make sense.
Now I don't know if LKY thought of it in these terms. I think that, as a language learner, he went by experience. I guess the more time he spent practicing Mandarin, or Hokkien, or Malay, the worse his English prose got. And that's exactly how it works. Happens to me all the time, and happens to anyone who uses 2 or more languages regularly. The more different the languages, the less commons structures they share, the more acute the problem. Again, there is no reason why it should not be so. Information takes space. It isn't hard.
Alas, it is true that academic linguists will not tell you this, even though they probably did in the 1950s. That is not because common sense has been "refuted". It is because since the 1960s academia has morphed into a worldwide racket of fraud and deceit. If you read this blog you already know that; economics is bogus, climate science is bogus, psychology is bogus; even more than half of medical papers are bogus. Well, surprise surprise, linguistics is also bogus. The language learning industry is huge. There's a lot of money in telling people that the brain is made of magic dust, that they can learn whatever they want whenever they want, as long as they give you money. 3 languages at the same time? Go for it! Kids are like sponges, they can learn anything. No, they can't.
Now of course, all human traits are distributed in a Gaussian curve. Some kids are pretty good, can learn 3 or 4 languages given some exposure. Some can't even speak 1 language properly by the time they enter primary school. Lee Kuan Yew, who was in charge of spending Singapore's money, realized he didn't have money to waste, and he took what was the most rational decision: let's focus on having everyone learn English, then let's make some half-assed effort at teaching a "mother tongue"; mostly for political reasons, so tribalists didn't complain. Some kids will learn the mother tongue well; most won't. Not the government's problem. Lee Kuan Yew was CEO and what he wanted was an efficient workforce, so English it was. And English he got. Well, kind of.
Japanese researchers, fortunately isolated from their American comrades because of their ineptitude at learning English, have long found that Brazilian immigrants in Japan often end up not bilingual, but "halflingual". They end up speaking shitty Portuguese and even shittier Japanese. Because Japanese is hard, they don't speak it at home, and whatever they speak at home tends to have very low vocabulary levels. So they end up sounding retarded even if they really aren't.
You know who else sounds retarded? Singaporeans. OK, sorry, that's overly harsh. I apologize to my Singaporean readers, I love you all. But I had to say it. With all due respect, Singaporeans in general don't speak proper English. They speak Singlish, which is a pidgin English with a fair amount of Chinese grammar and vocabulary baked in, and a pretty weird (and what sounds to me a pretty big Indian influence) pronunciation. As you may remember, even Singapore's prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, by every account a 150 IQ genius, speaks what can only be described as pretty goofy English. Again, it's not their fault, it's just the unintended consequence of public language policy.
How did this happen? By forcing diglossia (widespread bilingualism) on Singapore. After independence most people spoke some either Chinese dialect at home, Malay or Tamil. The schools taught English, what is a foreign language to everyone. So yes, they learned, the minimum required to pass the exams, and went on with their daily lives. Given that kids spent almost more time at school than at home, eventually the exposure of English was greater than their respective languages. Let's say a random Singaporean teen was exposed to 65% English and 35% Hokkien during their formative years. So, surprise surprise, he ended up speaking a language which is 65% English and 35% Hokkien, and so did most everyone else, with all languages and dialects getting some of their stuff in this hodgepodge lingua franca that evolved into Singlish. And once that got widespread it became almost impossible to change.
My mother is going to die without ever learning English. But that's OK. I speak heavily accented English, and if I ever have children they will speak English as their native language. Assimilation is a generational process; just like no individual organism ever evolves, but rather the population evolves, no individual immigrant ever fully assimilates, but their lineage does.
From "Immigrant Assimilation Is Obviously High" by Bryan Caplan:
In The Culture Transplant, my colleague Garett Jones writes as if there is overwhelming evidence that assimilation is slow. So overwhelming, in fact, that you’d have to be a blind fool to deny it. I think his reading of the academic research is deeply wrong. But even if he were correctly summarizing what we know from the data, he’d be deeply confused about the actual facts about assimilation.
What are these “actual facts”?
First, if you compare first-generation immigrants to people from their countries of origin, they’re very different. First-generation immigrants proverbially do straddle two worlds. Yes, most seem very foreign to natives in their new country. But they also seem very foreign to friends and family from their original country! I’ve travelled all over the world, and met hundreds of first-generation immigrants in the U.S. My wife is a first-generation immigrant. I see with my own eyes that their assimilation, though far from complete, is high. If your eyes are open, you’ll see it, too.
Second, if you compare the children of immigrants to their parents, they are very different. A contrast of night and day. Indeed, I’ve never met an immigrant parent who failed to notice that their kids had massively assimilated. Usually, though not always, to the parents’ dismay. And again, I’ve known many hundreds of second-generation immigrants. They’re some of the people I know best in the world. All four of my children are second-generation immigrants. If any of them still had one foot in Romania, I would know it
If you want to quickly assess an individual’s assimilation, your best bet really is to listen to how they talk. If they can’t speak the local language at all, they’re probably not assimilated at all. If they speak the local language with a thick accent, they’re moderately assimilated. A mild accent? Highly assimilated. No accent? Then their assimilation approaches 100%. If you’ve met a lot of immigrants, you know this to be true.
Crowstep
5hr ago
Please, stick around. Every forum needs new blood.
If you're interested, the origins of the forum are that there is a blogger called Scott Alexander. His subreddit had a politics discussion thread. This thread moved to its own subreddit (r/themotte) and later to this site.
The aspiration is for civil, charitable political discussion and a place where tone is moderated rather than content.
I agree that BC and AT weren't banned for leftism.
I was more saying that the forum can be perceived as a "right wing secret club" because, for example, a feminist might consider some of the writings about feminism to be boo outgroup, only there are no feminists here. Whereas a comment that is around the line of boo outgroup towards the right will be read by many people who are right leaning, so there are many more chances for an individual reading it to decide that it is over the line and create a hostile discussion.
This isn't necessarily an insult against the mods, because it is admittedly hard to decide when things are right on the line.
Mantergeistmann
5hr ago
I remember waiting a full year for the government to complete a task... at which point I reached out to my local Senator's office, and within two weeks, shockingly it was done.
Mantergeistmann
5hr ago
I don't think this is a WEIRD vs not situation. I'd expect anyone in a Western society, faced with a blank bureaucracy and a dire situation, to reach out to someone who might know someone who might know something about the situation.
AnonymousActuary
5hr ago
Yeah this is what I've emphasized - you will improve at this if you work at it, but doing so will result in a lot of losing along the way. We went to a chess club event recently and I prefaced it with "everyone here is going to be much better than you, but you will learn some things". She had a very good attitude, and I thought played some very solid moves that even I hadn't seen. She said she wanted to go again, so I think for now I keep nurturing it. Hopefully can find some people more her level for her to play soon.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
5hr ago
Languages are hard, and they probably lived in some refugee community.
Grant_us_eyes
5hr ago
No, you stumbled into a weird little internet site that cleaves more closely with old-style forums, with old-style rules that aren't explicitly defined, and the expectation that you at least lurk quietly to adapt to the overall local culture before making yourself known.
If you've been exposed to nothing but reddit and/or twitter for most of your online life, of course this place is going to look weird. You came in expecting an industrial rave and instead got an English Gentlemen's Club.
Stay around a bit. You'll be fine.
@Lizzardspawn for visibility
I think there is a 'basic' answer here, just in terms of energetics.
Looking at a single atom version of the reaction they're talking about to create gold, the idea is that you have an atom of mercury-1981, and you hit it with a neutron. If all goes well, the end result is one atom of mercury-1972 and two neutrons coming out. You can just compute the energetics of this reaction just from mass/energy conservation. This is, indeed, one of the first things I computed when going through the paper. The answer is that the reaction is endothermic, which is similar to what you might have seen in chemistry - the reaction requires you to put energy in in order for it to happen. The way you typically put energy in is to have a fast-moving neutron that is flying in to hit the mercury-198 atom. When you do the calculation, the required energy in for the neutron is just under 8.5MeV. You must have a neutron flying at least this fast into a mercury-198 atom to accomplish the desired reaction.
Common uranium-235 fission reactors do produce neutrons flying around; that's necessary for them to keep the chain reaction going. But the energy of those neutrons is low in comparison. It does produce a spectrum of neutron energies, but the peak of that spectrum (the most number of neutrons produced) is around 0.7MeV, the average being about 1.9MeV (it's a bit skewed)3. You can find that the spectrum does continue to tail off toward the higher energies, but eyeballing the chart, you have about a two-and-a-half order of magnitude reduction in the production of neutrons that are at the sufficient >8.5MeV range than you have at the lower energies. If I actually integrated the curve, the number of sufficiently energetic neutrons produced would surely be <<1% of the total neutrons produced, and the question really is about the number of zeros I should put after the decimal point before we get something non-zero.
Now, fast breeder reactors. They do also split plutonium, which does produce a slightly faster neutron spectrum... but it's not much. The curves are quite close to U235. The 'fast' part of the name is just that they use the (primarily ~1-2MeV) neutrons they have directly (when they're "fast", where "fast" means >1MeV) rather than slowing them wayyyy down with a moderator like they do in traditional reactors.
That is, the short answer is that existing fission reactors just don't produce enough neutrons that have enough energy to convert mercury isotopes (see footnote 2 again). Whereas with deuterium-tritium fusion reactors, the primary reaction is just H2+H3=>He4+neutron. If you do the energetics here, assuming worst case scenario with no kinetic energy coming from the input hydrogen atoms, you still get neutrons coming out with just over 14MeV. That's plenty of energy to hit some mercury and get what you want. If, of course, you can design your reactor right (and there are a bunch of other considerations that I won't get into here; just this basic consideration of energetics should be sufficient for the instant question).
1 - Mercury-198 is a 'relatively' abundant natural isotope, about ten percent of all the naturally-existing mercury in the world. In gathering it up, you'll likely be digging it out of the ground. Then, you take that ore and process it until it's the kind of stuff you want. Generally, people use chemical/physical means to get rid of other stuff and 'isolate' the 'good stuff'. This is the 'enrichment' bit.
2 - Thereafter, Mercury-197 naturally decays to gold with a half-life of like 20-70 hours (I didn't go back and look up the exact numbers for this comment).
3 - A weirdness that requires getting into looking at cross-sections is that they actually prefer even slower neutrons for further U235 fission. This is why they have 'moderators' in reactors - to slow neutrons down to a speed that is best for further fission events. There's fun back story here in the history of the development of ideas for the possibility of sustained fission; it took some work to figure out which isotopes of uranium would split with different energies of incoming neutrons; it turned out to be important that U235 would do fine with slower neutrons (which it could, itself, readily produce), whereas U238 required faster neutrons and couldn't sustain itself with its own production of neutrons.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
5hr ago
I’m not seeing the problem with Francophone. Vicky 3 starts in 1830, right? They’ve been doing business in French for longer than the U.S. has existed.
Speaking of which—how likely is it that a pro/anti-slavery culture which has triggered a civil war actually would enact the relevant policy? I would expect it to be near 100%, which is presumably why Paradox hardcoded it. And are there other hardcoded war->policies?
Most of your other mods either look reasonable or are beyond my understanding of the mechanics. You’re going to have to explain what “incorporation” is supposed to represent if you want commentary on those :)
Crowstep
5hr ago
But we should probably demand better
The optimal amount of crime is not zero.
I would love a system that deports 100% of illegal immigrants and never mistakenly deports a legal immigrant, but such a system cannot exist outside of fiction. The world is messy and complicated and people make mistakes and lie and misremember and enforcement of any law is expensive and difficult.
The developed world has been experimenting with the 'better system' and it has been abused to such an extent that it has lead to fully fledged volkerwanderungen and ethnic replacement of a native people in a single generation.
The idea that the West should be more lenient to illegal immigrants because of a few sob stories seems laughable when one considers the scale of the thing.
A_Wee_Hearts_Toll
5hr ago
This doesn't make sense in context. There are constant offer of peace talks, constant public praise and hit pieces, years of rumor around Zaluzhny's political future etc. Seymour Hersh is a joke with negative alpha.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
6hr ago
You have me sold. More novels need alcoholic monkeys, Daoist or not.
stuckinbathroom
6hr ago
Unironically, this might be indicative of the single biggest difference between WEIRD and non-WEIRD societies: the expectation that people naturally will—and should!—leverage social ties, especially family/kinship ties, to get preferential treatment when dealing with large, impersonal bureaucracies like the government. The Chinese call it guanxi, but of course it has a million names besides, in basically every part of the world except Northern Europe and the Anglosphere. Hell, even in the Anglosphere, we have the old saw “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know”, which gestures at the same thing.
There’s not enough evidence to say whether this situation in particular is a case of such behavior, but it being Latin America, I wouldn’t be terribly surprised. Then again, it is Chile, which I vaguely intuit is WEIRD-er than par for the Hispanophone course.
Yeah, Frozen II songs were a little too on-the-nose.
There is a certain type of "Children's" entertainment that is really geared towards Parents. Books like "Love You Forever." Episodes of Bluey (I know this is controversial, but there are more than a few episodes of Bluey that have little interest to kids but is more geared toward teaching the parent.)
Frozen II is kinda there. Or rather, it's geared towards the 20 year olds who will never have kids but can reflect on their own childhood.
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