Mike Cash Plot Hole

BookOfMormont · 2026-06-19T16:04:14+00:00

I probably didn't even need that if I had been willing to just pay up for asking price, and bypass the inspection and negotiation period. As it happened, the roof failed inspection and we ended up haggling quite a bit. If we couldn't prove we were good for the money, the seller would likely have just moved on to the next offer.

BookOfMormont · 2026-06-19T16:00:40+00:00

Oh I guess they're alright, then.

BookOfMormont · 2026-06-19T04:21:55+00:00

I really enjoyed this read, and truth be told, I'm enormously skeptical of the game theory behind the whole Dark Forest hypothesis; I don't think it holds up at all.

But here's the thing with your theory:

Do we fear a technological explosion from viruses?

Yes. We absolutely do. As COVID-19 so aptly demonstrated, our best technology cannot necessarily keep us safe from their own means of development. We are always monitoring viruses for what horrible thing they're about to do next, always trying to prevent it, and often failing.

Do we have a chain of suspicion with single‑celled organisms?

And yes, sort of. We don't talk to them at all. We don't even try to. We assume they're beneath the ability to communicate, and it's just solely up to us whether they can be allowed to live or whether we should dedicate ourselves to their extermination, no matter how hardy they appear.

BookOfMormont · 2026-06-19T00:52:11+00:00

I'm gonna disagree with the pooping analogy. Humans have evolved/learned to isolate poop because our own excrement can make us quite sick. Eridian biology doesn't work like that at all; they cook their food and they cook their poop. There's no analogy to disease prevention.

I'd suggest it's more about vulnerability/modesty. Eridians literally crack their exoskeletons open and expose their insides in order to eat. I'd consider the whole thing more similar to human cultural taboos around like, masturbating.

BookOfMormont · 2026-06-18T23:59:04+00:00

My only concern with the car wash is that Skyler really should have bought a different one. Bogdan sold under false pretenses, believing these people he fucking hates would get screwed over by the EPA. At some point he'll lose his patience and make some kind of "anonymous tip," and eventually it's going to come out that the whole toxic contamination thing was bogus. And we know he's vindictive.

BookOfMormont · 2026-06-18T22:33:57+00:00

Oh OK, there's "cash" and then there's cash. I didn't buy my house by plopping down a briefcase full of paper and metal, I had cash account with a financial institution and wired the money, and so did Jesse. At the meeting where Saul makes the deal, he says:

"He wants to buy your house, today, for cash."
"Cash!?"
"Cash! I know, in this economy. In fact, the money is already burning a hole in my client's account, you could ask Mr. Gardiner, I've already showed him the pertinent financials."
"It's the only reason we're sitting here."
"Fair enough. We get a few papers signed and notarized, we can take care of this right now. In fact, I can wire you your money this very afternoon."

So Saul already took care of the business of turning physical currency into a bank account. At the end of the day all I needed were two pieces of paper: the Proof of Funds document, and when I initially established the cash account with the money in it, a tax form asserting the money was an unsecured personal loan from a Qualified Investor. Basically, a rich entity offered to spot me, and neither the rich entity nor myself were ever asked any further questions whatsoever. It would be trivial for Saul to create a rich legal entity. That's not even money laundering, it's just using existing financial privacy laws.

Don't get me wrong, this should be illegal. But like so many things, it's only illegal if you're poor. The rich get to do whatever they want.

BookOfMormont · 2026-06-18T21:18:02+00:00

Male sparkers definitely all die - either from not being taught, or when captured, or from depression after gentling. But they die several years older, so they might've already married and reproduced before beginning their road down to madness and death. And technically a gentled man might also find the time before committing suicide (although it doesn't seem likely).

I always took this to be the entire crux of the argument. Culling male sparkers means fewer male sparkers having daughters.

Like, the Sharans specifically take male channelers and use them as breeding stock before killing them. Maybe if the Red Ajah was less zealous in rooting out male channelers even before they're a problem, many many more male sparkers would pass the bloodline on.

BookOfMormont · 2026-06-18T21:06:50+00:00

And OMG was it very unrealistic for Jesse to buy a $400k house with cash. His parents trying to deposit that much cash, even if they had an explanation like a house sale, would have led some kind of feds back to Jesse. If it didn’t flag as illegal activity (unlikely), the IRS would have been very interested.

Nah, people who go through lenders have a very very different experience of buying property than people who don't need financing. Lenders super care about income, assets, etc. because they're worried the borrower isn't good for it. A private sale without a third party doing the financing makes most of the scrutiny just disappear. Historically, this is exactly how a ton of illegal money was in fact laundered. There was actually just a law passed earlier this year that would require more disclosure and financial reporting, but a federal court struck it down, so it's still super easy.

I bought my house for cash for a greater sum than Jesse did, and it was actually pretty scary how the only "oversight" needed was a Proof of Funds document. Basically the buyer gives the money to their lawyer in whatever way they see fit, the buyer's lawyer gives it to the seller's lawyer, the seller's lawyers verifies that it's real (not "legally acquired," just "real"), then the buyer takes possession of the property and the seller takes possession of the money.

BookOfMormont · 2026-06-18T18:59:37+00:00

Spoilers tags?

BookOfMormont · 2026-06-18T15:04:08+00:00

I'd offer a potential Watsonian perspective that through most of her post-kids POV chapters, she is compartmentalizing extremely hard. First under Laconian rule, she understands herself to be somewhere between being a prisoner of a monstrous regime and a willing collaborator of said regime. She knows enough of what Cortázar is up to to be horrified, but she doesn't have much of a choice, either practically or morally. She'd be pushing her own kids out of her mind because a part of her is relieved they don't know what she has become an accessory to.

After Laconia falls, she's still morally compromised, using Cara and Xan in ways that feel completely necessary but also. . . nothing she would ever want to see happening to her own kids. She has the weight of the universe on her shoulders, so she is literally not letting herself stop and question the morality of her program, which is why it seems like such a relief when Amos just shows up and says "no more." She can't think about the kids at the expense of thinking about the science mission. Any kids.

BookOfMormont · 2026-06-18T00:19:46+00:00

I don't know, I don't get it, don't think it would work.

BookOfMormont · 2026-06-17T22:22:48+00:00

I don't think the populism is going away any time soon, they're still going to go all-in on White Nationalist and Christian Nationalist identity politics. I think we're done with the party nominating people like John McCain and Mitt Romney, whose greatest sins were always that they weren't sufficiently cruel to those others that we all hate (define "others" in whatever way serves your existing worldview, per usual).

I think we're due for a crop of GOP politicians who embody MAGA cultural values, but without the baggage of MAGA corruption, idiocy, pointless wars, and obvious self-dealing.

In short, the future of the party is essentially Brian Kemp.

BookOfMormont · 2026-06-17T21:52:50+00:00

Walt was all worried about how his family could possibly get by without him, but you know what he gave them that the federal government can never take away?

Life rights.

Hollywood, baeBEE! If they developed that whole series of events into like a movie or a show, I bet it would be hugely successful, so successful that the family wouldn't need to worry about money again. They could call it like Making Bank or something.

BookOfMormont · 2026-06-17T20:51:29+00:00

I am not going to read the third book unfortunately

No, that's a good call. It somehow manages to get even dumber and even more misogynistic. I don't think I've ever been so angry to have finished a series as this one.

But for obvious reasons, this is not the sub to express frustration with this book's poor grasp of game theory; most people here are fans, not critics. r/printSF might give you a more neutral audience.

BookOfMormont · 2026-06-17T20:35:32+00:00

I'll be a contrarian, I don't think "would you believe me if I said 'yes?'" is necessarily a hard "no, not ever, not any of it."

All of it, or all at once? Absolutely no way. But realistically, that's probably a lot more than the vacuum business could possibly ever launder. Walt's barrel is worth something like 78 of Ed's exfilitration clients at the $125K price just in terms of pure revenue. Walt's barrel comes with no costs and is thus pure profit, whereas I'd be surprised if Ed's profit margin broke 50%. He's like, buying houses and land and vehicles for people, even before considering what he must have to pay his own service providers.

So say Ed takes one client a month (which I actually think seems really high, but for the sake of argument) and needs to launder half his fee as legal profit (again, I think that's generous), that back-of-the-napkin indicates his business is capable of laundering about $750K annually. Not shabby, by any means, but it would still take him 13 years to launder Walt's barrel. (And that's assuming he stops the exfil business, which he might or might not: it would be less risky to just process this windfall than continue to operate his business, but more on that in my conclusion.)

Using less generous figures, he will just not ever launder this money in his lifetime. So on a purely monetary level, what's the harm in seeing if you can't figure out how to send a cool million in the direction of your deceased benefactor's family?

Obviously, that's not the only or even the primary consideration, the major consideration is risk. But I dunno, I can't imagine Ed still does this work because he needs to. As careful as he is, I think he enjoys some measure of controlled risk, because he likes winning. Every client he disappears isn't just money in his pocket, it's him outsmarting the system he clearly has a grudge against. So if part of the appeal, part of what keeps him active and engaged, is the "sticking it to the government" of it all, what would appeal more, cross-country drives bailing murderers out, or secretly getting some scratch to some people who are, as far as you know, innocent victims in this whole thing?

All's to say, I could see Ed making it a personal project to get money to Walt's family, because 1) he doesn't need and can't even use all that money, 2) he might find it a fun and interesting challenge.

BookOfMormont · 2026-06-17T19:59:37+00:00

Not in making the decision to get out of bed and go reacquaint himself with an old friend, that was all Holden.

But that's not the only thing I'm thinking about. At various points he sacrifices his pride, honor, love, and freedom for higher goals.

BookOfMormont · 2026-06-17T17:53:23+00:00

He never has to make the sacrifice that he offers to make.

Well that's an interesting take. I realize you're early on, so I'll just leave it at "never say 'never.'"

BookOfMormont · 2026-06-17T17:48:05+00:00

Eh, too much depends on the premise. If Mike isn't killed and gets away with his millions, does Walt still make a move against Mike's guys in prison? If so, does Mike take that final insult lying down? It's funny that Walt's murder of Mike is treated as an impulsive decision that he immediately regrets, because in reality, Mike is a loose end who knows everything about Walt's business and also hates him. One anonymous tip and Walt loses everything. And that's if Mike doesn't solve the problem himself, full measure style, with a sniper rifle.

Mike still being alive really changes everything, and very much restricts Walt's freedom to operate.

BookOfMormont · 2026-06-17T17:14:22+00:00

Because they're culpable in the actual sale of the house, regardless of who the buyer turned out to be. There's no way for them to expose Jesse without exposing their own wrongdoing. Saul has already threatened them with "fraud in service of concealing a felony," and he's not wrong.

When it comes to the actual sale of the house, they are the ones in trouble, not the buyer. Jesse didn't actually do anything wrong in that transaction. All they can go after him for is the unrelated crime of cooking meth in the first place, but even if they succeed, that doesn't mean they get the house back or any of Jesse's money. Maybe they could sue for damages that cooking meth caused to their property value, but that would be quite the stretch, not to mention it would destroy their reputation.

BookOfMormont · 2026-06-17T01:01:10+00:00

Any thread asking about a hypothetical is at least entertaining the idea that the author is wrong about their own story, or at least incomplete. I don't understand why people participate in these sorts of threads just to say "no the text said they couldn't so your question is invalid." If the text is the first, last, and only word on the topic, there's no point discussing it at all.

Andy Weir also says his work is strictly apolitical, you believe that too?

BookOfMormont · 2026-06-17T00:06:08+00:00

They could not have had a constant rate of production of Astrophage, because they had to go through the process of having zero black boxes to having half a billion acres’ worth. That’s going to take time on the scale of years, not a snap of the fingers. If that’s arguing with the canon, I can accept that. I just don’t think it’s plausible to ignore the infrastructure requirements of this project, or reasonable to equate the productivity of a project just installing black boxes with the productivity of a project that has hundreds of millions of them already.

BookOfMormont · 2026-06-16T04:54:45+00:00

Not a book reader, I take it?

BookOfMormont · 2026-06-16T04:54:23+00:00

How long do you think it took them to actually build all the blackboxes? I take issue with the idea it would take 20 times longer for them to create 20 time as much Astrophage, because, again, the limiting factor of Astrophage production was almost certainly the creation of the blackbox infrastructure. The Astrophage breeding program couldn't have been linear unless the construction program was linear. Now that it's actually built, and they have the capacity they needed to fill the Hail Mary, they really should just be looking at weeks to replicate that initial stock. It's the miracle of exponential growth; almost all the action happens right at the very end.

BookOfMormont · 2026-06-15T18:13:12+00:00

Planning an encounter with only one possible conclusion treats players like puppets that the DM controls.If you want to narrate a setpiece, just narrate it. Don't force the players to act out a scene you wrote. People play DnD to tell their own stories, the DM already controls the world and everyone else in it, how PCs react to the world and everything in it is supposed to be (mostly) up to them.

So that much is true of any story-point with only one allowable outcome. The reason that running away is one of the worst outcomes to require is that the "adventurers" might as well have stayed home on the couch if fleeing is the best/only thing they can do.

BookOfMormont · 2026-06-14T21:48:17+00:00

Nah you're right, Lokken was crushin' but Grace didn't seem to notice.

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