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Tenaz
9hr ago
I find the entire arc of a game of Civ fun, and while the late game isn't quite as good as the early game, it's still really fun to me.
Which one do you play? I find the late game of 6 to be quite a drag, and 5 isn't much better. Early-game civ is easily 10x as fun for me.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
9hr ago
There's a (likely just-so) hypothesis they teach you in undergrad biochemistry, or at least there was many years ago. The first enzyme in the catabolism of glucose, phosphofructokinase, is thought to be a key regulatory step in the pathway - as downstream products build up, flux through the glycolytic pathway is decreased. Fructose has a parallel catabolic pathway that bypasses this regulatory step and thus keeps churning and is more likely to stimulate de novo lipogenesis in the liver (aka getting fat).
I'm not sure how much stock I'd put in this, or how it interacts with CICO. But I think this hypothesis trickles down in an increasingly garbled form to the public and may be a large part of the hostility towards HFCS.
The_Golem101
9hr ago
Remember these aren't civilian towns anymore, they're warzones, you're supplying soldiers in an area with enough water to survive, alongside food, ammunition, entrenching equipment etc, and taking fresh men in and the wounded etc back. If Russia could stop every truck into a given area, they would control it and quickly occupy it, it's not defensible, same for Ukraine the other way around, their effective actions around Izium mostly involved Russian units panicking as their supply lines were close to being closed and they ran for it.
For a town close to the front you use trucks, for one on the front you use MRAPs and APC/IFVs, for a fighting position on the edge of town you use runners through your trenches, but again interdiction means that you are degrading but not stopping this, which might largely happen at night, under fog etc. It's absolutely not the case that Russia can stop anything like all deliveries even to these contested areas, but it be high cost for the Ukrainians, forcing them back in the end. Here's a video (that's certainly wrong in bits, but gives you an idea) that covers one of these key town sieges: https://youtube.com/watch?v=igFrblANpQk .
Almost none of the civilian infrastructure is working, these places are wrecked, and the utility pipes are shredded. Meanwhile, Russia is trying to degrade utilities to big cities, but they can be repaired, there's some redundancy and defended by AA assets etc. If your assumption as to why Russia is moving too slowly is that they're being far too soft, that almost certainly isn't the case.
HereAndGone
9hr ago
Reading the linked Guardian story, here's a line about the Morning Call paper which broke the story and was getting fed all the heart-rending details from the family:
They noted the purported family ceased responding to their requests for clarification on Monday, and they couldn’t verify details in Guatemala.
Well, I'm sure the heart-broken family will get right back to them any day now in order to clarify what is going on!
zeke5123a
9hr ago
Ever hear of the story of the boy who cried wolf? I don’t think even Garak can salvage this one.
zeke5123a
9hr ago
And now it turns out the guy died in Chile in 2019.
Honestly if you hate the west so much why are you living in the west?
Edit: didn’t realize the OP was banned. Didn’t mean to challenge someone who couldnt respond.
Lazuli
9hr ago
I'm not a fan of deckbuilders, either, but Balatro makes the process accessible and fun. If anything, you could focus on the roguelike angle of getting to the end game.
faceh
9hr ago
I'm playing around with the idea of them basically becoming a semi-colonized nation where they sign various deals for access to their resources with enough countries, and have enough 'foreign' infrastructure built up in certain areas of their territory, (ideally nearer the Russian border) that there's now broader interest in maintaining their independence.
This would also grant more interest in providing foreign investment to rebuild. Unfortunately I probably underestimate Russia's motivation to crash such a party.
roystgnr
9hr ago
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.
birb_cromble
9hr 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
9hr 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
9hr 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.
10hr 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.
10hr 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
10hr 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.
10hr ago
They also have no history under the People's Republic, however.
oats_son
10hr 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
10hr 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
10hr 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
10hr 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
10hr ago
Really? Career bureaucrats who are fine but not rich but know rich people seem like a large group
hydroacetylene
10hr 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
10hr 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.
Taiwan is ethnic Chinese who literally speak the same language, and lots of Taiwanese celebrities and people visit China on vacation/tours/etc. They're arguably more linked to our adversaries.
Nice so in 2014 we got strong allies in the region, and now because of two weak and cowardly presidents in a row we might lose it. I guess the days of America growing more powerful and influential is behind us.
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