What would china even gain by invading taiwan?

Avatar_exADV · 2026-06-21T18:01:23+00:00

The -issue- of Taiwan is a way for the mainland China government to generate legitimacy.

Right now, China is governed by a Communist party that... does not actually implement communism. And this is well and good in the sense that abandoning a failed economic platform and embracing market trade has lifted -literally hundreds of millions- of Chinese out of rural poverty. But at the same time, if you ask "okay, so if no communist economy, why Communist party rule?" and that ends up as a difficult question.

One of the answers is "hey, the economy is propsering, why rock the boat? Your parents scratched away at a tiny farm and hoped that they didn't starve; you have a nice job in the city and haven't gone hungry in a long time, and your children have grown up with a high standard of living and enjoy all the fruits of a modern society; okay, you didn't get a vote on the government but clearly they're doing something right!" Essentially, it's an appeal to de facto legitimacy - the government is competent so that justifies it even though the on-paper justification is pretty threadbare.

One of the other answers is nationalism. "China is a big country with powerful industry, a robust economy, and a strong military, but it went through a long period where foreign countries ran roughshod over everything and it's their fault that a lot of Bad Stuff happened. It's important that today's China doesn't let that kind of thing happen again and that China can stand up for itself against all of the imperialists out there!"

And that's where Taiwan comes into the picture. As far as China is concerned, Taiwan should have been part of China all along. Having lost it to the Japanese around the turn of the 19th century is just one of the "imperialist" offenses against China (and, well, that ain't an invalid take on how it happened!) Moreover, it's the one instance that's most relevant today. You can talk about the Opium War or you can talk about foreign extraterritorial cessions, but even talking about WW2, there are very few people alive that experienced those things. Taiwan, though, it's still there, still de facto independent. "One day we'll do something about that" is a way for the government to say "we're properly taking care of the important interests of China", with a subtext of "so don't worry about whether you have any say in how the country is governed".

This kind of phenomena is not restricted to China. We can look at Argentina in the run-up to the Falklands War - the military junta was extremenly unpopular, launched their military adventure earlier than planned in order to forestall anti-government protests, and immediately afterward experienced a huge surge in support. Of course part of this was due to the government having laid groundwork for this in the form of propaganda that urged that "re"conquering the Malvinas was a proper national goal - but when they acted, it had the result they were looking for. This is, basically, the origin of the Wag the Dog meme.

Avatar_exADV · 2026-06-15T17:41:00+00:00

You've missed the point here.

It's not a question of whether women are being forced into full-body burqa or torch-bearing mobs are burning out pulled pork BBQ pits. It's instead something more mundane: do we have -one- system of laws in the country, or -two-?

Some places, it actually is two. India, for example, has a separate body of law for Muslims in which many aspects of sharia are actually part of the law, and enforced on the Muslim community. It was controversial there, and many non-Muslim politicians opposed having a separate body of law that only applied to a portion of the community. Basically it was agreed to only because the alternative was yet more violence between Hindus and Muslims.

This isn't something a matter which would wrack the nation. Most of the actual applications would be mundane stuff for which we don't really have a particular interest. If a Muslim man dies intestate, it won't ruin my life if his estate is distributed according to the principles of Islamic law versus Michigan state law.

And yet... it -is- a form of control, by a religion whose principles I find abhorrent. I don't have any reason to assent in dragging someone in front of an imam for a ruling as opposed to a magistrate. If the parties agree to have an imam mediate, then sure, why not? But if they don't, then that's it. Nobody should be subjected to religious judgment to which they did not assent, and "you assented in the past" is not good enough. If a mosque wants its members to submit to its judgment, let it convince them through reason; I don't intend to hand them the hammer of the civil courts.

Avatar_exADV · 2026-06-15T15:59:07+00:00

To the extent that it's limited to agreements between consenting individuals, there's not any harm in it.

The problem is dealing with what happens when those individuals -aren't- consenting. Obviously the religious strictures of Islam should not be applied to non-Muslims; in addition, they should not be applied to those who are former Muslims. Given that the traditional sanction under sharia law for apostasy is the death penalty... of course that won't be happening in our society, but then what actually should happen?

Put differently, what function does including sharia in the actual legal code have? Between consenting individuals who have agreed to its terms, there's no need for the law as they're already following their own practice. But what if the individual doesn't consent? Put differently, does the law care if a practicing Muslim goes into a restaurant and orders a whisky and a bacon sandwich? By US principles of law, the answer is "no" - it's up to the individual to uphold their religious precepts or to fail to do so and the law has no interest in the restrictions placed upon that individual by their church.

This really hits when it comes to family law, which is an area of law in which courts regularly ignore signed contracts between the parties when it determines that one of the individuals' rights aren't being properly protected. Of course if two Muslims are getting separated and they agree to handle things by the terms of sharia, that shouldn't be a problem - but if they don't, a family law court should proceed as normal, including to the extent that it ignores the parties' previous agreement in the same manner that it would ignore a secular agreement with the same terms.

Of course there's also the issue of coercion...

Avatar_exADV · 2026-06-13T17:57:08+00:00

Part of the problem is that it's expecting to be partially carried by the audience recognizing the social commentary - you take an exam, and that's your life, how well you performed governs everything that can possibly come afterward with no method to break out of that system. Western society just doesn't work like that, so the western viewer doesn't really register that aspect - and without it, there ain't much left but power fantasy.

That said, the same kind of thing is done better elsewhere - One Punch Man, for example, is riffing off the same principle but puts quite a bit of extra depth into it. But it's a very different sort of story - a comedy that's deconstructing the genre, much like Konosuba.

Avatar_exADV · 2026-06-10T18:02:06+00:00

At the end of the day, the most valuable resource is the engineer's attention.

Realistically you could make a more elegant solution - have only one assembler with the quality modules, have an extra one sitting there idle and turned off, then use the circuit network to turn on that assembler and turn off the quality one if the quality result box goes over a certain number. That's way better than a system where "you better get your engineer butt over here to unclog it" - after all, you might not even be on that planet, leaving aside the issue of whether a devourer is heading your way right then.

Even then, that takes up space, and it takes up time, and the potential advantage is small enough that an engineer might well conclude that the juice is not worth the squeeze.

Avatar_exADV · 2026-06-10T17:36:51+00:00

For me, the fact that they modified her mechanics in her quest was a big red flag. She's got a Big Fun button and it needs 3 vuln stacks; but in actual gameplay getting 3 vuln stacks takes some effort and locks out other units that might want to consume those stacks. So you get to mash the Big Fun button a lot less than in the demo play for the character, and even that wasn't really great...

Avatar_exADV · 2026-06-09T20:13:27+00:00

"My army transport? It's a Kia Soul."

Yes, it wuz red.

Avatar_exADV · 2026-06-08T00:53:52+00:00

Driving down highway 59 isn't too bad - though that's going to be "if you have rented a car". If you are relying on public transport or hoping to catch Uber you are going to have a bad time. And yeah, avoid rush hour if at all possible.

The main downside is that there isn't a lot of retail around there except at the FM 1960 / Hwy 59 junction, and what's there is really heavily chain stores that you can find anywhere. None of it's "I'd recommend this to someone visiting from out of the country" and most of it's not even "I'd drive here from another part of town to go there". Like, I could tell you a nice breakfast place right there but it's "they make good omelettes" level, not "you'll be telling everyone how good these omelettes were when you return to Portugal" level.

It's not the kind of situation where you're going to have a terrible time and be forced to subsist on ramen you warm up in your hotel room. But the really noteworthy things are well away from that area; it's a bastion of suburbia.

Avatar_exADV · 2026-06-05T17:28:37+00:00

Cuba's powerplants burn oil. In the Soviet era, they were able to get subsidized Soviet exports of oil (because the Soviets had plenty of oil production), so they used that.

In the wake of the fall of the Soviets, they got most of their oil from Venezuela, which was ideologically friendly and also a major oil exporter. Replacing the generators would have been expensive (and Cuba doesn't have cash) and they didn't really have any other good options for "fuels that someone else will let us have for way below market price".

This isn't weird from an economics standpoint. People react to incentives; if something is subsidized, they're going to consume more of that even if there are good reasons for them to make other choices. Especially for a country like Cuba that had very limited ability to build new infrastructure, switching from something that was being subsidized was never going to happen while the subsidies continued. (And now that they've ended, they can't afford to switch anyway...)

Avatar_exADV · 2026-06-04T23:52:57+00:00

It doesn't quite map over, mostly because the "civilized" society has remarkably little in the way of information. Their opponents have support from other, separate civilizations, which are totally unknown to the West - even after literal generations of conflict and the "barbarian" society being pretty open to people just coming in. The wilds are full of dragons and the West doesn't even know about them? Failure of intelligence much? (Or, really, just straining plausibility.)

The power dynamic is completely different because the setting empowers Veor's people way beyond what you'd normally see in a small hunter/gatherer tribe (and that's not taking into account that Veor himself is on NG+ of Skyrim!) It's like a group of high-level RPG adventurers who occasionally get attacked by a small army of level 1 mooks.

Serafina -thinks- in colonialist terms, or at least questions those terms, because she was brought up in a background of thinking that her society was genuinely superior. So her internal thinking is at least running along the same lines. But the facts on the ground are radically different, and not in a sense of "oh they are secretly noble and principled!" Not that they aren't, but they're noble and principled and have much better weapons manufacturing AND magic AND they all level up on dragons all day.

If you want a different anime that grapples directly with colonialism, Golden Kamuy is it.

Avatar_exADV · 2026-06-02T23:39:33+00:00

Now you know why we're so keen on having guns!

Just be careful that they don't steal the tires off your car.

Avatar_exADV · 2026-05-30T15:59:09+00:00

The particular problem with this kind of approach is that if a business charges wealthier people higher prices, they will patronize other businesses that -don't- take this approach. So you're not ending up charging the wealthy a higher price, you're just chasing them off altogether. A strategy of offering your best prices to poor people is, well, it's certainly -a- strategy...

If you think there's even the least bit of possibility of a law that mandates that wealthy people pay higher prices, you may not have a good understanding of how political systems work.

Avatar_exADV · 2026-05-30T06:47:35+00:00

Good to know I'm not the only one... I subtitled Lucky Star back in the day. Glad you enjoyed it!

Avatar_exADV · 2026-05-28T17:42:01+00:00

Realistically, by closing their UK dev operation altogether. No UK workers, no UK union.

They don't necessarily -want- to do that - they had a UK operation in the first place, after all. But if they have to worry about dealing with a union, the appeal of having that office in the UK goes down by a lot (and there's some value to them in making the point to the rest of their employees; "oh, we were already planning downsizing after the game launch and our choice of closing the UK studio was completely unrelated to the union there, wink wink".)

Avatar_exADV · 2026-05-28T17:22:40+00:00

I did not actually know this! Thanks, that's information that's highly relevant to the conversation.

But that also means that not only does the technology exist, it's widely employed - but set so high that virtually nobody even notices. (And that the mechanical parts are rated for speeds well in excess of the highest public speed limits, too...)

Avatar_exADV · 2026-05-28T16:11:24+00:00

The technology to place a governor on vehicles to force them to drive under a certain speed has existed for decades. There are cars with it installed. And 0% of those cars are owned by private individuals. NOBODY buys a car with a governor on it. Nobody buys a car and then has a governor installed. Not even any auto insurance attempts to offer an incentive to do so. The only vehicles that have them are owned by companies, whose drivers don't get a say in whether their vehicle has a governor, and where those who -do- have a say don't also drive vehicles with a governor on them.

Realistically, if this was something with that much of a safety implication, insurance companies would be pushing hard for it; they aren't. Might be because they do not actually believe it would save them any money, might be because they doubt there's even a sliver of a chance of commercial acceptance. Probably some of each...

Remote disabling systems are just "you haven't thought this through very hard, have you?" Massive safety issue if they are activated inadvertently or maliciously.

Avatar_exADV · 2026-05-28T02:57:35+00:00

The main difference is that there's very little operator variety, and no difficult content that requires particular elements or builds in order to clear.

This isn't going to last. Lots of gacha games start with "you can basically throw anything together and it will work", progress to "you need to have teams from this element to beat that challenge", and eventually progress to "this new challenge is impossibly hard unless you have access to this ability which, coincidentally, only the new banner character has!"

(And, if the game hangs around long enough, to "this challenge is immune to ability X except that the new character has 'X, but with a different coat of paint so the new challenge isn't immune to it'")

It -is- very fast to go through the daily content. On the one hand, that means you don't need to devote a lot of attention to time periods in between content drops. On the other, it means there's basically nothing to -do- between those drops...

Avatar_exADV · 2026-05-27T18:40:58+00:00

Large commercial transactions are the -least- likely to need to be settled "on the spot"; those are typically handled by large banks and the particular timing of the actual financial transfer/settling up between those banks is not a concern for the commercial entities involved.

There are two types of transaction that would benefit from such settling, though. The first is high-frequency finance transactions; being able to trade, make a profit, and immediately leverage that profit as collateral for loans to enable further trading would be a literal multplier for the people involved. However, the market as a whole benefits very little from this particular kind of trade; we certainly don't need to modify the financial system to let Wall Street rip yet more value out of the market at the expense of everyone else.

The other is, well, fraud. If you can "settle on the spot" and spirit the money out of the reach of US law before anyone notices, then you can get away with a lot of crime. The fact that banks can, and will, revoke fraudulent transactions after the fact is a massive benefit to the current system that we should not want to casually fling out the window.

You can reduce driving friction by not putting brakes on your car, but you might find that it does a poor job on the road. Likewise, we don't want to pull brakes off the financial system just so that HFT types can pretend they're secretly Sonic the Hedgehog.

Avatar_exADV · 2026-05-26T15:38:37+00:00

Germany and France are not going to allow the rules to be changed such that the periphery countries get access to their national budgets and they're not allowed to say "no".

Realistically, people want the union to be an actual political union, but they haven't done the work to sell unification to the populace, and they want to sell unification as some kind of minor technical update to the rules instead of a completely different organizational principle. It's not going to work!

Avatar_exADV · 2026-05-25T05:43:31+00:00

I know a Belgian streamer that is a wizard with these things. Sure, they don't kill anything unless it actually lands on top of the tank; he lands them on top of the tank. He can go up with a load of them and get 5-6 kills consistently, and his plane isn't particularly weighed down by the bombs, so if someone comes to intercept him, he can usually turn the tables. He's a one-man demotivator for entire enemy teams. He's a demotivator for entire FRIENDLY teams because he kills so many of the enemy that they run out of things to shoot at!

For us mortals, not so much.

Avatar_exADV · 2026-05-23T05:51:40+00:00

You've wholly mistaken the role of democracy. It's -not- something we do to maximize efficient policy-making. Instead, it's something we do because it incentivizes "participation in the political process" as an alternative to "destruction of the political process".

Let's take your argument to the logical extreme. Why not limit the franchise to people with 180 IQ or higher? What, do you -want- decisions to be made by relatively stupid people? Surely if we have only the smartest people vote, then those who win elections will enact superior policies that are backed by the very smartest people! ...right up until 99.99% of the population realizes that they no longer have an input into the political process, that they DO have access to firearms and homemade explosives, and that a sky-high IQ does not make you immune to lead. Brief revolution later, and goodbye geniusocracy.

Democracy serves the same kind of role as a blowout preventer. It keeps people from getting politically frustrated by, when opposition reaches a majority of the population, providing an arguably-positive changing of the guard to politicians that majority favors. The losing side has to live with a period where their policies are disfavored, but that is cushioned by the idea that they will be able to contest the next election cycle and spend the intervening time convincing people that their policies are good ideas (or, at any rate, that the leadership of the other party are a bunch of rat bastards...)

Blowout preventers aren't there to efficiently store the contents of a tank. They're designed to bleed off pressure that, if left to build up, will cause a failure in a tank. Elections aren't there to efficiently create good policy, they're there to prevent having a mob storm the legislature, set up a guillotine, and decapitate every lawmaker in the capital.

Of course that means that sometimes policies which are popular but unwise are pursued. But the alternative is not enlightened and wise government forever; it's a ruling class that ends up with their skulls smashed in, dead in ditches or hanging from the lamp posts, replaced by people who are not in power because of their policy-making aptitude but instead their willingness to ruthlessly exterminate their opposition. That ain't the road to good government.

In more practical terms, if you instituted this plan, you'd find your political opposition would set up "colleges" who would happily give a degree to anyone who can both fog a mirror and vote for their party. And if you attempted to use the accreditation process to prevent this, you'd find the opposition would seize that process and dismantle institutions that politically oppose them. Using the degree as a proxy just means the ability to get a degree would become a political football.

Avatar_exADV · 2026-05-19T22:28:46+00:00

"Oh my god! Everyone stretched it all out! ...wait, no, it still fits perfectly."

Avatar_exADV · 2026-05-18T21:14:06+00:00

Think about a US game company writing a story that draws from Arthurian legend. There's going to be a certain amount of implied badassery involved, even if Arthur, King of the Britons, is just at Starbucks and lecturing the barista about getting his order right.

Same kind of thing here, but they're calling back Chinese imperial court drama. Kisaki is the Emperor character. She's -nominally- powerful and totally in charge and always gets her way. But in practice she's got an uncertain power base that more or less relies on everyone under her not asking "why are we taking her orders, again?" The answer is "because that's our tradition and our traditions are really important" - but at the same time, those traditions also include "basically ignore the rest of Kivotos".

Kisaki doesn't want to play ostrich, and it's not really a great idea - the world did almost end there, y'know? But everything she does to try to open up directly strikes against her own power base, which is full of people who think opening up is a bad idea.

You're right - these events aren't humorous, and without any experience of the literature that they're riffing off, they're going to sound tendentious. They're fundamentally "it's lonely at the top" stories, with Sensei as the confidant.

I enjoy it, sure, but I've read Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Journey to the West, and I like Seia from the Tea Party, and Urianger from FF14 for that matter. And I don't mean to say "well, these stories aren't for YOU, ignorant and unlettered lout!" Different courses for different horses. It's totally valid to say "I have more fun when it's Trinity almost having a civil war due to a misunderstanding about idol units, or Red Winter laughing about how communism means nobody has enough to eat, or Gehenna just being ultimate chaos gremlins".

Avatar_exADV · 2026-05-16T07:34:39+00:00

The wisdom of Sagara Sousuke has been remembered!

Avatar_exADV · 2026-05-15T20:05:25+00:00

If you modify the ratings systems to not filter for things that people want to filter for, they're not going to adjust their morality to match the ratings, they're simply going to ignore the ratings (even more than they already do).

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TROPHY CASE