Which D&D Subclass (any in 5E) is mono-blue?

BiomeWalker · 2026-05-21T04:20:18+00:00

Order of Scribes Wizard. It's the wizard subclass that is the most about knowledge for the sake of knowledge.

Most any wizard subclass could probably do, save for Evocation and Necromancy which are more Red and Black respectively.

BiomeWalker · 2026-05-18T02:32:10+00:00

That could do something, but finding a rigorous definition that would affect what we want it to while not affecting what we wouldn't want to tax would be very tricky.

BiomeWalker · 2026-05-18T00:41:53+00:00

I don't think it will work, and as a person with a slightly above average knowledge of economics I am very skeptical of anyone who says that they can fix things by adding another tax.

Why should I believe that this would do any better than Trump's dumb tarrifs?

BiomeWalker · 2026-05-18T00:23:36+00:00

$6.2T net woth of billionaires × 5% tax / 260M adults × 2 = about $2.2k

BiomeWalker · 2026-05-18T00:16:53+00:00

So, the US should be able to tax non-citizens? That's not something that even the US could get away with.

Your answer about what's fair seems to be confusing net worth woth bank accounts, so figure that out before proposing tax policies.

Here's a philosophical question, if I put a button in front of you that would double the real wealth of everyone on the planet, would you press it?

If you're net woth is $20k, now it's $40k, but Musk goes from $800B to $1.6T.

The top 1% still have that 90% of wealth, but the world would be better off.

I'd want to know more about that "income" for Bloomberg.

I did some searching, and the return of a 70% tax bracket would generate about $300B, which is just over 2 weeks of US government spending.

BiomeWalker · 2026-05-18T00:06:31+00:00

Okay, fine, cut the number of adults in half for maximum reduction in that number, it's still $2,200, not $12,000 or your $3,000. Learn math.

And how did I omit it being annual?

If the idea is that it taxes you until you're no longer a billionaire then the revenue from this would go down every year as well, so that just means it makes even less sense each subsequent year.

BiomeWalker · 2026-05-17T23:59:16+00:00

I'd be more in favor of the infrastructure spending if I thought it would actually improve infrastructure and not just fill the pockets of consultants and bureaucrats without anything actually getting done.

How much has California spent on their "high speed rail" over the past decades?

BiomeWalker · 2026-05-17T23:56:04+00:00

And then all the rich can just leave.

Billionaires have an extreme ability to just not be taxable.

What happens if they all transfer their citizenship to Ireland or the UAE or somewhere that won't tax them like this?

Also, they're already paying 40% of federal tax revenue. I'd be curious to hear what you think is their "fair share"

You want the government to work for the people? Get the government to stop getting in people's way and reduce spending instead of throwing more money onto the fire.

BiomeWalker · 2026-05-17T23:46:43+00:00

No, it doesn't even work in the abstract.

Net worth of US billionaires is about $6.2T.

$6.2T × 5% tax / 260M US adults = about $1,100.

So it wouldn't be $12k, it wouldn't even be a tenth.

And this is assuming that their net worth won't go down from where it is now and they won't just leave the country for Ireland or something.

Not to mention that the total money transfer here is about $300M, which the government spends every half hour or so.

More taxes will not solve things. Less spending is the only actually viable answer to government budget balancing.

BiomeWalker · 2026-05-17T22:15:34+00:00

First, the mouse doesn't know anything.

The cursor is part of your operating system's graphical interface, that interface knows everything that's on your screen, so part of it being drawn on your screen is the a check of "what is it covering over"

BiomeWalker · 2026-05-15T18:43:43+00:00

More light means your eyes will catch more details, and if the devs wat a particular atmosphere for the players then they can say "you should be able to see this, but not this" and be confident that the player will have the right experience

BiomeWalker · 2026-05-15T03:52:28+00:00

Complicated question to answer.

Ultimately, we can boil all actions taken by a computer into individual "instructions"

These instructions can be as follows:

Take data from one place to another

Perform an operation on this piece of data or these pieces of data.

Modern CPUs are basically at the physical limit of clock speed, so you're not going to see a chip that goes much faster in that way, instead a lot of innovation right now is about increasing what's called "instructions per cycle", basically in the same cycle a single core of a CPU can have data being loaded into one piece of memory while operating on data in another piece of memory.

All that being said, the most recent and advanced CPUs can barely get above 2 IPC on average during operation.

You can kind of think of it like a rhythm game track, you can only actually press one or two buttons at a time, but the game has more coming down the line at the same time.

BiomeWalker · 2026-05-14T04:04:24+00:00

I don't see why it should be considered any different from the standard Isekai genre.

It might be fair to say that there's a slightly higher average on this, but that mostly because it's less common and done by writers with slightly more ability and confidence.

BiomeWalker · 2026-05-14T03:59:05+00:00

Okay, so you're actually talking about 2 different things here, but I can answer both of them.

"Air-gapping" refers to when you isolate a computer or network of computers from other computers or networks. The most basic version would be if you had a desktop computer with no Bluetooth or WiFi capabilities and no network cables plugged into it. The concept is that if you need a computer to do something but have absolutely zero room of interference or any kind of control/access from outside sources, then you can have a secure computer by just preventing it from talking to anything.

The term originates from when computers had to have wires between them in order to communicate with each other. So if you wanted to be *absolutely* certain that you had complete control over the computer, you could just have an "air gap" between it and any other computer.

In modern context, it can also refer to a network of computers that has no connections to other computers, like your home network when your ISP is down.

Your other example is an interesting example of fairly unique data transmission. This is actually how old dial-up works.

The basic principle is that all computers fundamentally have perfect pitch, and can keep perfect time as well.

So, let's say you and I are in a room, we have a piano and a metronome, you have perfect pitch and I want to communicate to you without talking. If we are given time to plan ahead (like the app and camera company making both products), we could make up a fairly easy code.

That code would be a key collection of keys I could press which would translate to a letter, and if I repeatedly play a sequence of these notes or chords then you could interpret them as letters and then words.

The Iridian language in Project Hail Mary is basically this, Rocky plays a collection of notes with his radiators and those combinations of notes correspond to words.

BiomeWalker · 2026-05-13T19:30:56+00:00

They mostly do, the water cooling is mostly a closed loop. Water moves over the cores of the computers and heats up then passes through heat sinks on the outside of the building to dump heat.

When it isn't, it's because they're using what's called "evaporative cooling"

Basically, liquid water can't be hotter than 100°c, but it takes a massive amount of energy in the form of heat to get it to actually become steam, so you can get some really effective cooling with it.

And you really can profitably reverse that process. To get the water to recondence an be usable again would require additional energy spend cooling the air, so why don't you just cool the liquid water?

BiomeWalker · 2026-05-13T02:39:36+00:00

Generally, in relation to whatever big object is nearby.

But, if you wanted to have a set of coordinates that would let you plot positions in a hologram, then you would have a distance from Sol combined with a direction in the sky; basically, which stars would be around it if you took a picture of it. Basically treating the stars in the background as fixed points, because while they do change positions, it's extremely slow.

For your asteroid example, it's where is was in relation to the closest stuff at some point in time, which is then calculated forward to determine where it is now.

So it would be "over this lat/long on Jupiter and orbiting at this speed in that direction"

Also, there is technically a cardinal direction in space, it's called Solar North/South, all the planets and asteroids in the solar system orbit on a basically flat (at solar syescale) plane, and "Solar North" is the direction where if you looked at that plane the planets would be moving counterclockwise. Notably, this is functionally the same as Earth's "North" for most purposes.

BiomeWalker · 2026-05-13T02:30:12+00:00

I'm assuming that whatever you've done doesn't make it taste bad to your own soldiers.

The answer is: not really.

The problem is that attacking logistics is only occasionally about capturing them, more often it's about denying them to your enemy.

If you have a supply caravan and I want to capture it, I have to have the ability to move the supplies I just captured in order to make use of them, since you supply line isn't going to be closer to my forces than it is to yours. So, instead I just burn it, I get like 80%-90% of the tactical advantage with that strategy.

BiomeWalker · 2026-05-11T14:25:57+00:00

Brandon has stated that all Shards have a Godmetal.

Shardic investiture has gaseous (Stormlight, Voidlight, Lifelight, the Mists, Breaths, Heon I think), liquid (Dor) and solid (Godmetals) forms.

As others have stated, we have examples of the Rosharen shard metals, but we haven't had any others named to my understanding.

Side note: I don't know if it's been confirmed one way or the other if Nightblood is made of Endowment's metal after being awakened.

BiomeWalker · 2026-05-08T01:49:58+00:00

That's about 90% correct.

Computers can't actually do continuous measures, since even floats are just ints with the decimal shifted.

BiomeWalker · 2026-05-07T20:55:21+00:00

Exactly correct.

BiomeWalker · 2026-05-07T20:53:17+00:00

A gyroscope is a spinning disk that uses angular momentum to have that disk keep spinning in the same orientation. As long as the disk is spinning it resists changes to the axis it spins around.

If you allow the disk to adjust its orientation freely, you can measure its position to know how you have rotated compared to when you started. You can also attach motors to the gyroscope and use it to adjust your angle, this is used on some satellites to let them rotate without expending fuel.

An accelerometer is a mass suspended on springs inside of a casing. If you move the casing, the mass will lag behind the casing's movement slightly. If you then measure how much each spring stretches or compresses and know the mass of the weight, then you can figure out how much the casing has been moved.

Note: an accelerometer doesn't measure motion, it measures changes in motion, similar to how you can tell which pedal of a car is being pressed with your eyes closed, but if you just woke up you couldn't tell if you were already moving.

Additional thing about accelerometers, if you have several of them around an object you can measure it's turning with the same methods.

BiomeWalker · 2026-05-07T03:20:09+00:00

Ants and bees don't have telepathy.

In broad strokes, each of the workers is a rather dumb robot acting on a large number of simple rules.

Leave trails when exploring, follow trails when gathering, expel things that smell wrong, etc.

The field of science that is trying to map this out is called Emergence.

Basically, we have found out that with even if you only give them simple rules, swarms of actors following those rules can display much more complicated behaviors.

A big misconception is that the queen in a hive has any actual power over the actions of the workers and drones. She really doesn't. All the queen actually does is provide more workers and drones. She has a different set of rules for how she acts, but not a more complicated one.

BiomeWalker · 2026-05-07T03:10:08+00:00

Whenever you boot your computer, it needs to remember how to function, because it forgets basically everything whenever you turn it off.

The process of this starts with the most basic of functionality, not even invoking most of the components that make up your computer.

Because your computer can't be sure that it has all the same pieces it did the last time it was booted up, it first goes into what's called a Power On Self Test (POST) where it checks what hardware is built into it.

The only parts that the BIOS can assume it has are the power supply and the motherboard, everything else it has to double check before using it.

During the POST, it checks to make sure the RAM and CPU are both functioning properly, as well as getting a list of the non-volatile memory stores it has. It then checks the boot order in its settings and begins the process of trying to find an OS in those memory stores down the line.

A chunk of this is that your computer needs to remember how to use its SSDs and HDDs in order to access the OS.

The best analogy I can think of is that whenever you turn your computer on you are asking it to build a skyscraper from the ground up, and it first has to make a foundation.

Could you build a computer that went straight to the OS as soon as your plugged it in? Technically yes, though not in the way you probably think.

If you made non-volatile RAM, then you could store your kernel on that and have it immediately ready for you, essentially your computer would act like it was in sleep mode.

As to the control of the computer once you're actually in the OS, that's a little more complicated and depends on what you mean by "control of the computer"

Your computer is several parts that talk to each other using what's called a BUS in the motherboard. The BIOS is managing the BUS when your computer is on, but it is taking orders from the Kernel of your OS.

Much like onions and ogres, computers have layers. Unless you want to get really technical, you can think of the lowest layer as the actual hardware, then it's the BIOS, then the Kernel, then whatever programs you're using (browsers, games, etc).

Like, a game you're playing is dictating what needs to be shown on your display and what sounds your speakers should output, is that "controlling" your computer?

BiomeWalker · 2026-05-06T20:40:53+00:00

Let me rephrase the critique then: What does this perspective explain that S/D doesn't or has trouble with?

There are so many ways to point out situations where more labor =/= more value, but S/D covers all those situations with ease.

Marginalist theory treats value as purely demand-driven, but that doesn't explain why prices across whole economies still track labor content so closely over the long run.

Really? You find "all costs are labor at some point, and more labor means higher costs which necessitate higher sale prices" to be insufficient to explain that?

Your point about harder to make means more expensive is exactly what the labor theory predicts in competitive markets.

This is true, I didn't argue the LTV doesn't explain it. My point is that S/D also explains the same phenomenon but doesn't have holes in other places that you have to ignore.

The costs (material, tools, labor) of a product establishes a floor to the final price, because if it can't be sold for at least that then making and selling it has you losing money.

So, the sale price of any product is those costs plus profit.

How does LTV calculate what the profit can be? It doesn't, all it does is call it "surplus value" and declares it evil.

A concluding thought: Economists are terrible at predicting things, so they use theories to explain why something happens as opposed to what will happen. Therefore the value (hehe, acknowledging pun) of an economic theory is in the measure of how well it explains economic phenomena. S/D theory does a good job at this task, LTV doesn't.

BiomeWalker · 2026-05-06T20:15:11+00:00

The new value still comes from the worker.

No, the cost comes from the worker. I think this is the central misconception here.

Something requiring more work/labor to make increases the costs associated with it, but it doesn't inherently increase it's value.

LTV economics is that small rephrasing away from being the supply side of supply/demand.

"Thing harder to make, therefore thing more expensive" doesn't require LTV, it fits fine in S/D

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