birb_cromble
6hr ago
They genuinely feel bad about this and want to restructure society so that this isn't done anymore in the future.
Have any of them left the positions in question? This sounds a lot like rationalization for pulling the ladder up behind them.
roystgnr
6hr ago
Why the first one specifically? Civ 2 was one of the best of the series, but it was a pure improvement over Civ 1.
I'm not even nostalgic for 2 (4 was better in every way and 5 the best overall IMHO), but if you're missing the Civ 2 ruleset and don't mind a different user interface I believe that the Freeciv default settings are pretty similar and the available feature set greater.
If you were a Civ 2 fan, can I assume you played through SM Alpha Centauri? If not then forget about the Civ series and just fix that now.
roystgnr
7hr ago
And I can't justify spending that much time to myself.
My trick is to just focus on games with support for more than 2 players. If my video game time also counts as quality time with the wife and kids: boom, justified! (at least for a few hours a week - our multiplayer Civ games take months)
I played Disco Elysium though recently, and didn't regret it,
Heh, me too, though I regret the time sink a little bit. Not really something to share with the kids, though.
What gets me is, when I do have something single-player to share with the kids, I appear to have inadvertently implicitly taught them that only multiplayer games are worthwhile. Only one of my kids beat Portal, one of them never even tried it, and the third quit before even getting to the good part! Makes me feel like a failure of a geek father. If I can't get them into The Outer Wilds (which might work? it's good for spectating and ideal for turn-taking) I'm going to have to reevaluate entirely.
However, given that Russia, our #2 main rival, is having its military trashed pretty hard it's not like we aren't getting a pretty great ROI.
Makes you wonder why we were willing to commit so much materiel to Afghanistan for so long if we care about maintaining military strength for larger enemies.
Keeping the U.S. locked in Afghanistan gave our enemies pretty solid ROI too, and we have virtually nought to show for it now.
I dunno, seems like the actual winning move would be to encourage Europe to build up enough force to deter Russia directly. Certainly less taxing on our reserves.
Why were we concerned about Russia's military at all for such purposes? What threat did they pose to the U.S.'s interests outside of our need to reassure allies we're still top dog?
Now we've got an ongoing commitment to sustain a conflict that isn't going to pay off much for us unless the Ukrainians pull off an increasingly unlikely win.
And to the extent people expect Ukraine to functionally bounce back if peace is established, surely the same could be expected of Russia.
I guess that, unless the actual strategic objective is to bring Russia to heel and then absorb it into the larger Western Coalition that is culturally liberal and directionally opposed to China becoming a global superpower (which I'm not inherently worried about either), what exactly do we think we're doing here that's worth so many deaths.
I'm sorry but I really can't take Peter Zeihan seriously at all. Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 and 2022 because it views the risk of Ukraine becoming aligned with the West economically, politically, and militarily to be too serious a threat to its interests of regional dominance.
That doesn't really address the point that any invasion by Russia relies on sufficient manpower, and by absolute definition, with declining birth rates, their manpower will only decrease if they wait.
The timing is the issue, not the motivation itself.
I've yet to see anyone explain why the point that "declining demographics = economic stagnation = less globalized world = greater conflicts everywhere" doesn't follow, logically, other than us being in very uncertain times in general.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
7hr ago
Taiwan is in reality a rogue province
Taiwan was never held by the People's Republic.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
7hr ago
Point of order: You have your geopolitical metaphors out of whack. You're looking for "domino theory."
This isn't a point of order. Anyway, "domino theory" worked. First the Hungarian border fell, then the Berlin Wall, then the East German government, then the Soviet Union. I guess those weren't the dominos in the original theory...
Shrike
7hr ago
China won't care about escalation risk if they think we don't have the balls to put it all on the line for Taiwan.
I don't think this is true. We can actually help deter China without threatening nuclear war if we have the tools needed to fight a conventional war. Perhaps this means that China will always have "escalation dominance" over Taiwan, as Russia will have over Ukraine. But US interest in the region creates an additional deterrent effect (although it needs to be combined with Taiwanese resolve, which arguably matters much more than US resolve!)
I think Taiwan is a foregone conclusion if China waits
My personal opinion is that Taiwan likely becomes harder and harder over time. Part of this is due to demographic shifts in Taiwan. Part of it is due to increased US investment in procurement programs clearly aimed at China, at US onshoring and containment efforts, and at clear and increasing bipartisan focus on China as a serious threat to US hegemony. Part of it is due to internal Chinese social and economic issues (while I don't think China is going to drop dead in 10 years due to an aging populace, it is true as I understand it that they will never have as many military-aged males as they do today – I think this is less relevant for actual force generation and more relevant for societal casualty acceptance).
The Cuban Missile Crisis was about the Soviets parking missiles way closer to the US than we were willing to accept, so we engaged in a bit of brinkmanship and it wasn't a bluff.
I think this is overstated. For all the scary "brinksmanship" the public watched, the Cuban Missile Crisis ended in tit-for-tat negotiations, and the United States (secretly) agreed to withdraw its own nuclear missiles from Turkey as part of the deal. I'm not sure how the Politburo viewed it, but from a certain point of view it was a success for the Soviet Union, as its attempt to park ballistic missiles in Cuba to gain strategic parity with US missiles in Europe ended with regaining at least some of that strategic parity (by forcing the withdrawal of US missiles).
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
7hr ago
They also have no history under the People's Republic, however.
oats_son
7hr ago
Okay, those caveats are enough for me to be satisfied. I agree that there is not as much quality and much less actual diversity in game genre and creative liberties in general. I think you make a good point about game development and iteration. Insects lay 200 eggs that hatch every time they reproduce and this affects their speciation rate not an insignificant amount compared to primates which spend more than a decade raising their young.
I'm not sure there's enough cause to worry yet, though, because the art is young still, comparatively, and we know movies to have gone through different phases throughout the decades. Also, there's an absolute firehose of video games now compared to back then, so even a picky gamer can choose to play only good games. Unless he plays every day and gets bored quickly, I suppose.
I am annoyed that a space like this is one of the only places you can even bring this problem up. Why is that? Anywhere else, and the premise is questioned hard and it's assumed that you hate gay people. I'm guessing GamerGate made it so you can't question the choices of the industry anymore or something.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
7hr ago
Does Iran not count as having a modern multi-layered air defense system? They had S-300s, so second-tier Russian tech, which is mostly Ukraine had when the war started.
Per this page, Iran had 4 batteries, and their radar system got disabled by hackers before Israel attacked (surely a unique mistake enabled only by Israel's complete intelligence penetration of it) - Ukraine, it says, had 100. And still, from what I gather, Israel did not do manned overflights but just launched ATGMs over Iraq. The Americans did one overflight, but that was using rare bombers that don't scale and might well have been preceded by a backchannel "let us bomb you unopposed once for the symbolism, or shoot back and we will go all in" threat.
hydroacetylene
7hr ago
While Pinochet surely detained a few people who turned out to be innocent, only communists would have reason to fear- it's not like you can flee to the US from inside a prison.
FistfullOfCrows
7hr ago
Maybe I'm being too monstrous in my imagination, but if you disabled power infra to pumping stations you'd be able to cut off potable water supply, you can't hide water trucks from satellites/drones. I guess they just don't want to appear THAT evil.
zeke5123a
7hr ago
Really? Career bureaucrats who are fine but not rich but know rich people seem like a large group
hydroacetylene
7hr ago
Ukraine was ruled by Russia for about 45 years, from the end of WWII to the breakup of the Soviet Union. Before that it was partitioned between nearby powers, Poland and Austria ruled substantial parts before WWII.
hydroacetylene
7hr ago
Ukraine has a fertility stable population in the far west- which Russia will oppress because Galicia is the Balkans-level ultranationalist part of Ukraine. It's not the majority(or even close) but the UGCC has managed to get Galicia's fertility rate to stable just-below-replacement levels overall. Ukraine will be smaller but it will still be Ukraine.
HereAndGone
8hr ago
There is definitely not a slope, and were there a slope, it definitely would not be slippery.
I'm a social conservative, and the new orthodox faith of the One, True, Catholic Church of Trans Rights is not convincing me to shift on that. All the former gay rights activism that successfully sold the line "if you're not gay, this will have no effect on your life" to the mainstream and the trans activism that piggy-backed on this ("why are those bigoted conservatives so obsessed with bathrooms? no trans person has ever said anything about bathrooms, it's all them!") couldn't maintain the facade. Never mind "bake the cake, bigot", we're now in "um, aren't pregnant people women?/die, heretic! leper outcast unclean!" territory.
Yes, you too can be barred for life from the party you co-founded because you questioned a previous banning for life for not being 200% onboard with "we need this inclusive terminology so trans men and non-binary persons won't feel all oppressed and persecuted when turning up for their pre-natal appointments. Sure, maybe they're only 1% if that of people who turn up to maternity hospitals, but won't the 99% who are women be just overjoyed to make this teeny little change in being referred to not as a mother but a 'pregnant person'? And if they're not thrilled, too bad for them. They better know to keep their mouths shut, the transphobic bigots!"
Believe it or not, I want to be charitable to people who are unhappy with their bodies. I don't want to kick up a fuss about the changes. I'm not even that outraged about bathrooms. But when we're getting to the point of witch-burning someone for just being in the general vicinity of a witch, tell me how this makes society better for us all?
hydroacetylene
8hr ago
I can well understand how the demographic you're describing supports nimby with welfare to try to make up for it, and doesn't realize the circle gets squared by rationing, but there's simply not enough of them to explain the politically relevant forces we see in eg Germany, Australia, etc.
hydroacetylene
8hr ago
You are thinking like someone who does actual work. This is not a green party member or voter.
I'm being flippant, but this was never a labor party with union support. It was always champagne socialists- the wokest demo today, and the wokest demo then. Bluntly they expect to be on top of the pyramid because that's where they are now, and while feminism is a bad match for the military aristocracy who rule pre-industrial societies they don't face the same demands as the peasantry to drastically limit opportunities, force a high tfr, etc.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
8hr ago
Much as I'll respect Obama for trying, I don't think that deal did anything to stabilize the region. Like much of the US policy vis à vis Iran since, it was just a half measure to throw the whole problem under the rug for the next POTUS to deal with. Trump's "Mission Accomplished" moment is that too.
If the US was willing to codify the spheres of influence of Iran and Israel and enforce peace on both of them, that might be something, but short of that any accord is just throwing the war between the two into the shadows, for a time.
The whole situation bears an ironic ressemblance to the Israelo-Palestinian conflict where nobody is allowed to win, so it's all spycraft and buildup broken up by effusions that GPs have to quell.
The_Golem101
9hr ago
I'm skeptical on that number, though I'm sure there are reasonable costs higher than the direct aid due to the sanctions etc you can't take all inflation as a cost and put it all due to the Ukraine war, that guy's speech in 2023 to Singapore isn't exactly a knock down argument...
The_Golem101
9hr ago
I am personally acquainted with several dozen Ukrainians, and know several fighting. They're of the exact opposite opinion - I'm not sure how you came to meet so many that seem to support a Russian talking point? I'm genuinely curious, what's their background?
And propaganda or not, they think that Russia is taking far more causalities than they are, and no one seems to be talking about half a million deaths?
The Ukrainian narratives that I know are that they chose to stand up to Russia, are very happy with countries that helped them with equipment (very pro UK for example), and are confused why America is so hot and cold with shipments but still broadly pro US. They were going to fight with or without US/NATO weapons, at the big defeats Russia experienced at the start were mostly with Ukrainian gear, it was much later till the tanks, IFVs, aircraft and static AA started arriving, which allowed them to continue. They are also of the opinion that if Zelensky capitulates (or is seen to) he's gone next election, he was seen as soft on Russia pre war and is being outflanked by more popular warhawks.
Corvos
9hr ago
I was thinking of the SNP (Scottish National Party) myself. They got rid of male Salmond in favour of hip female Nicola sturgeon.
The_Golem101
9hr ago
Interdiction means that a percentage of logistics entering the town are destroyed/disabled, or can only move under poor weather, at night etc. You don't need running water or electricity to keep a fighting position supplied, you can truck/carry in their water, ammo, etc. but if part of that is being interdicted your logistic burden is just that much higher, X% is lost, alongside Y lives per tonne needed to sustain fighting.
The Russians are naturally going out of their way to starve out every town/fighting position they can, which is often a matter of ammunition not food or water of course.
Civ 3 really overpenalized playing "wide" instead of "tall". My father was a Civ fanatic but hated that one until I edited IIRC the corruption equation values.
Did you try Civ 5 with all the DLC? If you can't get past the ridiculous "one unit per type per hex" limit, that's understandable, but other than that it became a great game.
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