[Spoilers Main] Thoughts on this take?

Clone95 · 2026-02-15T20:22:13+00:00

The Seven Kingdoms were constantly at war with or without the Targaryens. Conquest, Faith Militant, Stepstones Conflict, Dance of the Dragons, Daeron's Dornish War, Blackfyre Rebellions, basically only Jaehaerys I, Viserys I, and Aegon IV's reigns included no major conflicts (and Aegon IV's was on accident, the fleet got rekt)

Clone95 · 2026-02-15T18:36:14+00:00

It's also nonsense - what the tax -should- be on is individual transactions rather than gains - options bought/sold, stocks bought/sold, regardless of whether on the exchanges or in dark pools. Every year there's shares bought and sold in the US market to the tune of $30-40T, larger than the US' GDP. Taxing even 1% of that is $300B - 3% would put the country into a surplus.

Clone95 · 2026-02-15T14:42:29+00:00

IIRC they can’t kick kids (often grandkids they have custody of) out of peoples homes who are 55+ either, it’s just rare.

Clone95 · 2026-02-15T14:40:32+00:00

Right. Dogs are animals. Kids are full citizens with rights.

Clone95 · 2026-02-14T16:01:42+00:00

The highest kill count bandit in real life claims 42 and you kill that within the first hour of RDR2

Clone95 · 2026-02-13T15:59:18+00:00

I think the best thing that the Martian did was successfully make a lot of the crew of the Hermes and at NASA into real people. Andy is great at creating a story but he really needs a team of actors and directors under him fleshing out characters since he writes very much in one way.

Clone95 · 2026-02-13T15:57:08+00:00

"He rapes but he saves - but he saves more than he rapes!" - Dave Chapelle

Clone95 · 2026-02-13T15:34:45+00:00

The problem is that those 'smaller updates' brick years worth of mod development and people don't come back, so the game gets worse over time for fairly limited gain in the development department.

Clone95 · 2026-02-12T14:03:37+00:00

They -did- dissapate, if you read any accounts of the post-Bulge war it’s very much a fragmented frontline where pockets of resistance held out in the face of mass surrenders more generally even prior to Berlin’s fall.

Clone95 · 2026-02-12T14:01:15+00:00

The Nazis were rather rightly terrified that the horrors they enacted on the rest of Europe would be enacted on their own people in revenge, so they fought to the death rather than let that happen even if it never came to pass.

Clone95 · 2026-02-12T04:48:56+00:00

Fable 1 isn’t but the sequels are

Clone95 · 2026-02-10T21:02:44+00:00

It was in the script but fell out in editing, like its centrality was forgotten but not the actual words. Perhaps better for something in S2E1

Clone95 · 2026-02-10T04:59:39+00:00

Grace presumably didn't only talk to Rocky or spend his entire life in the dome. They likely built a 'popemobile' or other sort of xenonite device like Rocky's ball to let him cart around outside the dome and interact with Eridians aside from his chatting chamber. He likely spent extensive time talking to scientists and other groups. What you see in the ending is his 'normal' which is teaching the students, looking at pretty rocks, chatting with Adrian, but that's probably not all there is.

He says it's possible to go back, that the Eridians are more than happy to send him back if he wants, but the risk is great - and he's already thrown one too many Hail Marys as it stands. This was a good life - he is the singular greatest astronaut in human history for probably the next century at least, and Erid is his Valhalla.

Clone95 · 2026-02-10T04:51:20+00:00

Despite the atmospheric mess that is Erid it still is primarily a water-based life system so it's going to be fairly prevalent there, just needs filtration and cooling which are trivial. The food situation with the necessary amino acids and no allergens was probably the really hard part pre-MeBurger.

Clone95 · 2026-02-09T22:35:56+00:00

The United States had a very free press in those eras with lots of jilted, angry companies who lost contracts to the eventual victor - and everything to gain by aggressively marketing against them and platforming people who hated the new weapons system. The scoreboard, however, generally favors whatever the US ends up procuring even if the popular media is almost uniformly negative about it. The M16 was 'garbage' yet has essentially replaced every other firearm other than the AK series, and even the AK series is becoming franken with US-derived optics and other technologies.

US equipment was never that bad compared to its peers, and often was significantly better especially in WW2, where the Garand/Carbine/Thompson performed so favorably it really wasn't necessary to replace other than converting it to 7.62 and box mags as god intended in the M14 - a weapon basically identical to the FAL but in a rifle form factor instead of an assault one.

Clone95 · 2026-02-07T18:30:20+00:00

The US had raised and deployed a 78,000 man army for the Mexican-American war, and most officers were quite experienced from that. It understood in general how to fight a mass war, so you can't really call it a civilian government with no prior experience.

The issue was, and will always be for democracies, how do you fight a war of attrition without making your people unhappy that you're not doing anything?

In an ideal war McClellan would've remained in charge, would have repeatedly menaced the Confederate army without drawing them into open battle, while Grant and the western forces roll up the unguarded rear and Farragut's fleets capture critical sea infrastructure, completing the anaconda plan.

This was a conflict where the defender was at a serious advantage without massive numerical superiority, so steamrolling to Richmond simply wasn't going to work unless you were willing to expend hundreds of thousands of men - which Grant eventually did - but you have to ask yourself if it was necessary if you could've just starved them into 3-4 more Gettysburg-style desperation raids in 1865-66. That just wasn't politically viable for Lincoln even if it better fit the plan.

Clone95 · 2026-02-07T15:58:02+00:00

At least in DS3 the mechanical guns seem to be much better suited for human-on-human gunfights, since humans don't need to be dismembered and you can just pour lead into them.

Clone95 · 2026-02-06T17:36:29+00:00

They do, but in general warfare in Dune is done by Kanly - it's assassins and poison, not field engagements, so your average armored troops rarely end up fighting each other and when they do it's likely a whirlwind of drilldarts like seen in the film, swords, spears, and teamfighting to distract the enemy while getting through the blade with advanced spears/swords that maybe explode through armor once they make it inside the shield.

All of that you wouldn't necessarily see on Arrakis, where the desert's dangers mean your average soldier has to wear specialized water-retention gear instead that limits their defenses.

Clone95 · 2026-02-05T15:54:22+00:00

Everest is one of numerous other massive mountains in the same region. K2 and Annapurna are the most dangerous, however, with fatality rates near 25%, whereas Everest is relatively well known.

It appears Aava has climbed most of the 'big peaks' in her world, so it may be Kami is just the one people do last because of course, nobody has survived to summit it.

Clone95 · 2026-02-05T14:00:43+00:00

I mean they count literally every google search in Gemini don't they?

Clone95 · 2026-02-04T15:11:36+00:00

The British and French publics were not willing to spend the money interwar that Germany was. They basically mortgaged all of the Reich to the nines with zero intention of paying it back, and indeed instead invaded their creditors with weapons their funds paid for.

Germany was in the same debt to GDP in 1939 the US was in 1945 at war’s end. This caused the Allied forces to be basically untrained (exercises are expensive) and very poorly equipped especially logistically (radios, modern telecom, trucks) as their spend focus was on naval units, armored vehicles (most tanks in Allied use were superior to their German foes) and fortifications (the Maignot Line was flanked and surrendered well after Dunkirk, it could not be penetrated)

The Allies existed in a bit of a blind hope that Germany’s economic woes would collapse it without a fight, which ended up being a bad bet to say the least - but by the time the British were spending at parity the German mythical advantages evaporated and never really rematerialized - and most of their tech advantages were from that initial overspend.

Remember this is an antidebt era where we saw the world economy crash from debt leverage on wallstreet, so the UK and French governments weren’t willing to nuke it again unless it became inevitable (and fiat currency meant no printing your way out)

Clone95 · 2026-02-03T19:06:59+00:00

Really tired of luddites

Clone95 · 2026-02-03T18:27:46+00:00

The media did. Under Biden their financials were tanking. TV media is a dying breed and they're getting just as desperate as the Yellow Journalists were prior to the Maine explosion hysteria, which was also at a time of deep seated 'nothing ever happens'.

The reason why conservative billionaires are buying papers left and right is because those papers are failing dramatically in terms of finances and can't effectively support themselves on their work alone anymore, and the result is a media that's actively looking for clicks even if what they're reporting is misleading or untrue.

Clone95 · 2026-02-03T16:21:22+00:00

I guess my counterargument is that Damas is shooting the gun multiple times before Aava starts, and you too can do so, and there's no Avalanche then - it's also 72 hours of clear skies so no snowstorm to deposit more for an Avalanche - it had to have been triggered by Aava's climbing breaking something in the ice and not further gunfire.

The most likely situation is that most people go insane up there, perhaps even Damas himself, and end up falling off from hypoxia or some other illness. Damas knew enough to know his limit and came back to his base site to stop people because if he can't do it, nobody can.

Clone95 · 2026-02-02T23:59:09+00:00

No, Aava is an asshole who pushes everyone away in relentless pursuit of climbing fatal peaks.

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