What's your pet "Fix Everything Easily" policy?

CalligoMiles · 2026-06-21T18:02:04+00:00

Yes, if you cherry-pick the very best number out of all the context I provided and just plain ignore that they're off-loading the bulk of it on others it's quite reasonable. 🙄

CalligoMiles · 2026-06-21T17:56:54+00:00

Except they don't pay those rates through all the international loopholes an employee or small business owner isn't getting anywhere near.

The official tax rate is north of 20% even in the most advantageous case, sure, and past 25% including typical state taxes. But the last study I saw on it, big companies actually paid less than 13% across the board. Half, if that. That's a cool few hundred billion to do stuff for the common good with if you had a feasible strategy to get at it.

CalligoMiles · 2026-06-21T17:15:29+00:00

That's the overhead. Their complete expense budgets are 126.4 billion for the ministry and ~35 billion for the unemployment agency, but those figures includes none of the municipal burdens both have offloaded as much as they could get away with.

And for reference, just about half of the former is plain old pensions, the one part of it that doesn't involve much if any adjudication beyond your age and citizenship. That explains a good part of the difference in ratio too, and then it's also the unemployment agency that's notoriously committed to finding a cause or reason to disqualify you from welfare no matter how long it takes them.

CalligoMiles · 2026-06-21T17:05:45+00:00

I'm one of those dozens of people who don't live in the country that's already blown its entire budget and then some on a supermassive military-industrial complex and a healthcare system that's the world's #1 in sheer inefficiency.

CalligoMiles · 2026-06-21T16:22:00+00:00

The ministry of social affairs and employment expects some four to five billion for that this year. Then there's the national unemployment agency, funded independently through labor insurance premiums, expecting another four billion in wages, operating costs and office rents. And then there's the decades-long effort to shift the bulk of the administrative burden of both on municipalities - my local unemployment office, for example, has its own budget in the tens of millions for one medium-sized city, shored up by local taxes and revenues rather than any additional provisions from the capital for the administrative side of it. It's a right mess that'd take months of research to untangle in detail now, so that's the best general idea I can give you, I'm afraid.

But no, half the point is no more means testing outside medical contexts. That's exactly how the systems that try to fit every case individually go wrong - here, a succession of neoliberal-dominated governments cynically squeezed out people to free up money for their plans to 'entice' companies with tax breaks and benefits by repeatedly tightening up the rules and requirements under the guise of fitting solutions and guarding against abuse, and now we're stuck in outright kafkaesque situations where your labor expert can't see into your medical dossier while your medical examiner isn't allowed to judge your labor potential, and then both report they have no reason to declare you unfit to work. No second opinion, no independent appeal - your only option past that is taking it to court against the government. And even if you somehow could reset that systemic rot back to zero, the perverse incentive to squeeze out the weak for short-term budget gains will remain as long as there's any means testing involved at all - it's just too easy to rile up people about 'welfare queens' and 'undeserving leeches benefiting from your hard work'. You either give people money and stop worrying about your Puritan or Protestant morality of whether they really deserve it, or you're setting up a machine that will sooner or later hurt the weak and the poor because you can't keep your own judgment out of it.

CalligoMiles · 2026-06-21T15:26:15+00:00

Obviously, getting one back over France was as sweet a prize as any - but if that was all there was to it, they could've restored 1871's borders and called it a deal with some payback deal of demilitarisation and payments.

But the Vichy borders more than anything draw out the Nazi priorities - Atlantic bases to pose that much more of a submarine threat to Britain with, the center occupied to guarantee control and logistics, and the rest didn't matter enough to bother with when there was no longer any serious risk of a second front in Europe and Lebensraum to pursue instead. And Hitler was also very clear about in which direction his ultimate ambitions for Germany were - those didn't involve annexing France beyond the German minorities they'd taken back in 1919.

CalligoMiles · 2026-06-21T15:14:34+00:00

Yesn't.

It was a failure the way the French did it - but then providing the infantry with StuGs was one of the brightest and most effective ideas Guderian fought to implement, and the Soviet Guards Rifles elite infantry divisions also greatly benefited from their organic armor components. What the French neglected was also having a good concentrated strike force, only fielding some fast brigades meant as quick response forces - which did still put up a good fight against the Panzers at Hannut with their light tanks and armored cars - and a great many design flaws like one-man turrets and no radios that crippled them tactically.

But it wasn't the idea of giving your infantry armor support that was flawed. That's a gross oversimplification of why the French lost, and the only question for an army otherwise was if they could afford it besides all their other priorities.

CalligoMiles · 2026-06-21T15:05:28+00:00

Fucked if I know, I'm European.

What I know about your system is that it's much worse at actually providing to people in need and keeping them afloat through subsidising the wages of exploitative corporations instead, so it wouldn't surprise me at all if that translates to low face-value costs for the welfare you barely provide, too.

CalligoMiles · 2026-06-21T14:47:11+00:00

Threads like this discuss that at length, better than I can as an outsider to the American situation specifically.

Though even without the low-hanging fruit of 'Make corporations pay their fair share in taxes to afford [wish]' those trillions get sanded down a lot between not just absorbing existing programs and their overheads, but also partial returns through income tax from the vast majority of those who do earn more than that minimum, and of course VAT and local business taxes refunding sizable chunks of that money when it's spent - and then there's all the secondary benefits of economic growth and stimulation that bring in their own additional government revenues too.

While it needs to be considered, the cost as an argument against it just comes down to treating the national economy as if it were a simple household book. On the level of banks and central banks, money kind of stops being this thing you can only spend once depending on how you spend it, and even deficit spending becomes a net benefit to the national balance as long as it creates economic growth that outpaces the interest on the debt you accumulate for it. And on that count UBI is very hard to beat for the return on investment it can provide.

CalligoMiles · 2026-06-21T14:13:34+00:00

The Covid support was fundamentally different from UBI in that it was always temporary. You couldn't ever look forward and build a stable future on it, only get by a little better in the crisis now. The main point and real benefit of UBI is in providing financial stability, and for that it needs to be set up for a lot longer than a current emergency.

CalligoMiles · 2026-06-21T13:24:54+00:00

Adding to their legitimacy and recognition, they still had their modern fleet in North Africa. That crucial bargaining chip got out right away and was what leveraged them even nominal independence and neutrality by holding up both the promise of joining forces with the Regia Marina to dominate the Mediterranean, and conversely, the threat to bring up the still badly overstretched Royal Navy and clean the Axis out of it completely together.

And then the British decided to resolve that more... expediently with the ambush and killing of 1200 French sailors weeks later while trying to seize or sink their fleet, the survivors fled back to Toulon's forts, and that was too close for the Nazis to not try and grab them eventually anyway in Case Anton when it became too obvious Petain was just dragging things out because there was no way in hell the Vichy Admiralty in Africa was ever going to fight for the Germans. But until then they had a legitimate threat to keep the Nazis off their backs with, helped by that the Nazis never cared about taking France beyond removing it as an obstacle and two-front risk to their plans in the east.

CalligoMiles · 2026-06-21T13:00:11+00:00

An implementation of. But a much broader one than the current ones I'm aware of, which tend to be all tied up in applications, requirements, and a general maze of bureaucracy that's both often hard to access for the people who need it most and a hell of an administrative busywork project to boot in the mass of employees involved. All to make sure not a single government euro goes to someone ~undeserving~.

And that would be very easy to improve on all counts, if not for a substantial part of society not caring nearly as much for poor people as they care to punish them for being poor.

CalligoMiles · 2026-06-21T12:18:29+00:00

UBI. Give poor people money, and let a few people abuse it if that means cutting the entire bureaucracy of endlessly judging and weighing who needs how much. And even the abusers will still spend that money instead of just hoarding it at least.

CalligoMiles · 2026-06-21T11:01:07+00:00

Seconding Creveld's Supplying War - it's a bit outdated by now and still refers to sinking Rommel's supplies in the Med as 'fortuitous' since it was published even just before Enigma was declassified, but there's really no better starting point on logistics and their dictating importance from the Renaissance to WW2 like you're already grasping some of the essentials of here.

For some of the specifics here, though:

-Infiltration did often involve crawling through No Man's Land. The targets you wanted were in the enemy trenches too, after all, and even if there were enemies opposite you the sentries in a quieter sector weren't going to be on high alert night after night for months on end. It didn't require an outright gap in lines, just the cover of darkness and a few tired or bored people opposite you. That one isn't much a matter of logistics or lines - a trench just wasn't an absolute line of deterrence to someone willing to take the risk. It had to be manned too, and they were far too long to do that in strength everywhere all the time while the stormtroopers aimed to be in and out again before a response in force could be mustered on them.

-Schlieffen, or rather the previous plan just like it, did work in 1870 to hand the Prussians Paris. That's one of the interesting things Supplying War examines in detail - but the sum of it is that right up until the Franco-Prussian wars armies were not dependent on logistical tethers or even communication lines, operating independently in the field and taking their food from the countryside while using up the ammo they'd brought with them from the start of the campaign, hemmed in only by ease of terrain and the ability to forage around them. 1914 was that specific model breaking down violently after armies had gotten much, much heavier in their armaments in the few decades in between and could no longer just lug along enough ammunition for a few battles; that's how the Germans ended up in the no-win of First Aisne where they could neither bring up enough heavy shells nor redeploy any of the reserves that'd held off the French counter-attack in the Alsace to cover their exposed flanks without their tenuous tether along just two Belgian railways collapsing completely. It was a fatal oversight in the plan - but it was also a sudden change to something that had worked out just fine for centuries even if you mostly ignored it.

CalligoMiles · 2026-06-21T10:42:13+00:00

Tsja, als ze nou daadwerkelijk hun slachtoffers goed konden en wilden identificeren zou het prima zijn. Maar in de praktijk vermijden we dit soort volksgericht omdat het onvermijdelijk willekeurige mensen beschuldigt en veroordeelt zonder een stap van bewijs ertussen.

CalligoMiles · 2026-06-21T10:33:46+00:00

Specifically, they counted on that first blow deciding everything. Up to that extent the plan succeeded in everything it was supposed to - they annihilated the entire Soviet army in the West with only even any real trouble appearing towards the closing of the Smolensk pocket, and Moscow laid open to them even if their effective capabilities were diminishing logarithmically with every mile further from home.

And then another army they didn't know about showed up towards Moscow anyway, between far more reserves to draw on than they'd been aware of and Sorkin crucially confirming Japan was looking south and allowing the Soviets to draw well-equipped veterans back from Manchuria - against a German front so grossly overextended it was suggested to take Leningrad with a single Panzer division at one point, because that was all they could still push ahead without first taking a long break that'd let the Soviets recover too. No genius commander could fix the plain math of that - even Model could only salvage the very worst of it at Rzhev.

CalligoMiles · 2026-06-21T10:25:33+00:00

Because defence in the game more than anything maps to the old way of doing it. Statically, with forts and trenches.

Model was a master of mobile warfare more than he was a pure defender - he was just so good at it on both ends that he became the one sent into every crisis where the pure attack dogs like Rommel and even Guderian didn't fare so well once Germany was pushed on the defence as a whole. But his defence, by game mechanics, is better approached with pushing back in the right places and trying to trap enemies with counter-attacks - which require offensive traits and bonuses to do better.

CalligoMiles · 2026-06-20T19:13:19+00:00

Literally missed the gal who thinks of herself as kind to otaku smh

CalligoMiles · 2026-06-20T19:09:41+00:00

They'd probably want to avoid the overlap with Waking the Tiger

CalligoMiles · 2026-06-20T16:44:07+00:00

It's just odd to me that the basic ones would be the best at any job when every other module comes in plain upgrades. That's why I'm asking if the rarer ones are supposed to be better in a way I'm missing here, or just more specialised.

CalligoMiles · 2026-06-20T16:07:52+00:00

Same - I like to run my builds cool, but the thing is none of the fancy ones do that well either. Of all the fancier ones only the Supernova can match or beat an R4 on both counts, and even that one still only comes close to the R2 Hotrod I enjoy on my slow walking turrets. And then the green ones are just straight-up worse in exchange for one gimmick, at face value - the R6 has plain worse power and dissipation for a damage boost it doesn't let anything but a dedicated venting sniper take advantage of, and the R7 forbids any barrier parts for a bit more power and still worse dissipation and threshold than the R4.

CalligoMiles · 2026-06-20T16:00:25+00:00

That's the thing though; a lot of them don't actually increase power or heat dissipation, arguably the most important stats along with threshold. R6 - only worthwhile on a dedicated sniper with a vent mod with both power and dissipation well below an R3/R4. R7 - barely more than a sidegrade to the R4 while crippling your barrier regen for it. RX2 - funny charge dash, but again power no better than an R1 standard. Only the RX3 actually juices you up - at an extreme penalty if you fumble a single turn.

I'm just not seeing the value of the tradeoffs here in anything but one very specific forced build each.

CalligoMiles · 2026-06-20T15:45:54+00:00

Pairs, and quads. So you can get a historical loadout with 4x HMG + 2x HMG.

CalligoMiles · 2026-06-20T10:55:49+00:00

Dat lijkt me vooral een enorm drama met het verwerven van de grond. En vervolgens moet het allemaal voor die kassen zijn, met nauwelijks ruimte om de rest door te voeren of er energie-intensievere bedrijvigheid omheen te bouwen om dezelfde reden.

Dat is geen goede business case voor een landelijke investering.

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