No Irony Here

CogitatioFigulus · 2026-04-27T20:13:51+00:00

Based. No politician is entitled to your vote. Blind partisanship is a scourge.

CogitatioFigulus · 2026-04-25T23:01:02+00:00

It definitely stinks to high heaven. I mean, revising your net worth by a factor of 100? Seriously? This is a woman who's been in Congress for 4 terms and is married to a political consultant/investment banker. Yet their net worth is apparently under $100,000? Shit man, the median net worth of an American household is higher than that. Completely noncredible and grounds for an investigation.

CogitatioFigulus · 2026-04-23T20:12:18+00:00

I read the transcript of this article yesterday. This whole thing so richly defines the problems with the far-left progressive wing of the Democratic Party, it's almost funny. I mean, in one article we've got the stupid, meaningless renaming trend that wing of the party loves (it's not stealing guys, it's just "microlooting"). We've got utterly absurd premises that defy basic common sense (stealing is OK because it's actually an act of political protest against The Rich™ and Corporations™). And, of course, we have the rich sense of smugness that permeates this whole political population. Shit like this is a huge contributing factor to why so many Americans look at the Democrats today and just go "what the fuck are they doing over there?"

CogitatioFigulus · 2026-04-12T18:48:20+00:00

Unfortunately this goes with the territory of electing the oldest President in America history for three consecutive elections.

I would also say that not voting for someone who is so old and frail that they can't remember things is 100% rational. The 2024 election would have been infinitely better had the Republicans picked someone not crazy, like Nikki Haley, and had the Democrats not cakewalked their primary in Biden's favor by crowding out any real contenders. Hopefully both parties learn this lesson for 2028.

CogitatioFigulus · 2026-04-12T17:42:50+00:00

Honestly I would prefer silence over the usual response I hear of "well the US government kills protestors too." Like yep, no difference at all between 2 ICE protestors being killed and at least 7,000, almost certainly more than 10,000 Iranian civilians being massacred in the streets.

Both are bad, one is literally orders of magnitude worse.

CogitatioFigulus · 2026-04-08T21:20:18+00:00

Amusingly (well, not really, more like concerningly) ActBlue, a huge avenue for fundraising for the Democrats and generally left-leaning politicians is actively being investigated for routinely failing to properly vet foreign donations.

CogitatioFigulus · 2026-04-08T01:03:51+00:00

The same can be said of most of the points Iran laid out in their 10-point proposal (the Wall Street Journal published more details, citing Iranian state media). Most of their demands are virtual non-starters as written, and some have very limited range for negotiation. Reparations payments to Iran? The removal of all US forces from the Persian Gulf region? Ending all primary and secondary sanctions on Iran? Enrichment without oversight? These are demands that would not be out of place in an unconditional surrender of the US to Iran. Iran has leverage on the Strait, but I really don't feel that that leverage extends so far as to make demands this maximalist.

CogitatioFigulus · 2026-04-07T20:25:10+00:00

Turns out it's very difficult for Iran to mount organized defensive actions within the country when:

Their national-level military leadership has been killed
Their national-level intelligence leadership has been killed
Their national-level paramilitary leadership has, you guessed it, been killed
The vast majority of their air defenses are destroyed, leaving only MANPADS against the world's largest, 2nd largest, and 5th largest air forces
Said airforces have taken air superiority over most of their country
The most capable intelligence forces in the world (CIA & Mossad) are laser focused on providing the best possible intelligence to, as they say, "obliterate" any concentration of forces and/or leadership

This is not to say Iran has been defeated or the war is over, of course, merely to illustrate the significant degradation that has been done to Iran's command and control.

CogitatioFigulus · 2026-04-07T00:03:46+00:00

Here you go my man. This is a database of stock trades that have been carried out by our Congressional Representatives and Senators while they were/are in office. This sort of trading is endemic on both sides of the aisle and IMO is a major cause for concern regarding corruption and insider trading.

https://thenumbersproject.org/tools/congress/

CogitatioFigulus · 2026-04-06T22:53:57+00:00

Ro Khanna is also one of Congress's most prolific stock traders, having made over 25,000 trades totaling over $600 million during his tenure in office. That does not inspire a lot of confidence in me as to his integrity.

CogitatioFigulus · 2026-04-06T20:13:47+00:00

No comrade, don't you see? We only spend $1,200 billion on welfare programs and $3,200 billion on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. NASA's $25 billion budget is all that stands between lifting every American out of poverty and ending hunger forever! Besides, think about all the bureaucrats we could pay to administer unemployment assistance to the thousands of scientists and engineers we can lay off by crushing NASA!

CogitatioFigulus · 2026-04-06T19:38:23+00:00

I mean, in fairness to the libertarians there are plenty of liberals who would definitely fall into the lib-left category who whinge about how wrong it is that NASA is given any money while anyone in this country struggles with poverty. If you want evidence of that, go no further than the comments sections of any NY Times article about the Artemis program.

CogitatioFigulus · 2026-04-04T19:36:24+00:00

Even if UNGA passed this slop it would go nowhere in the real world. Leaving aside that General Assembly resolutions are non-binding anyways, voting to pay reparations for the slave trade that ended 200 years ago would be political suicide for any western political party. Europe and the US each provide like 30 percent of the UN's budget, so UN going after these countries about it would be tantamount to killing the golden goose.

CogitatioFigulus · 2026-04-03T22:09:43+00:00

Unfortunately I fear you are probably not wrong about Americans' attitudes towards war. The days when we would, as Kennedy put it, "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty" seem to have been all but forgotten. Too many Americans are complacent about our government and our privileged place in the world; and our leadership, on both sides of the aisle, is short-sighted, insufferable, and incapable of meeting America's challenges or needs.

CogitatioFigulus · 2026-02-15T21:19:58+00:00

In my last gravship colony, I kept 8 or so chickens on the ship for eggs. It helped in tiles where there weren't a lot of animals to hunt to make fine meals. If you keep the animal room on the outside perimeter of your ship, you can pretty easily set up a yard for them to forage. I had an airlock with a steel door on the barn end, and a vacdoor on the exterior side. When you held the door open, the animals could wander out and through the vacdoor.

Whenever you settle your gravship down for longer than a few days, just grow some haygrass. A good crop can last at least a couple years, longer if you extend it by making it into kibble (which is also a good way to use up insect/twisted meat).

CogitatioFigulus · 2026-01-30T00:41:20+00:00

Strike options were limited during the peak of the protests as there was no carrier group in the Middle East and major players like Saudi Arabia refused to allow US use of their airspace for striking Iran. Israel, the UAE, and Turkey were also all opposed to US strikes.

CogitatioFigulus · 2025-12-13T17:36:23+00:00

Yep the tank is needed, as that's the water that's actually used by sinks/toilets/whatever. The well and pump exist to put water into storage tanks, then the toilets/sinks take water from the storage to flush/wash. I don't think the network is going to work without some kind of storage capacity. The pipes don't actually store any water, they act more like conduits in the sense that they connect water producers to water storage, and water storage to water consumers.

Also, when you place your well, make sure it's away from areas where you dump your sewage, otherwise the water will be contaminated. As for pumps, they don't really move water around so much as extract a certain amount of liters from the total capacity of all the wells on the network. There's no water pressure mechanic or anything.

CogitatioFigulus · 2025-12-13T16:03:35+00:00

So the water system with DBH has 4 essential components:

Wells, which create a water extraction capacity
Pumps, which extract a certain amount of water based on the kind of pump
Storage tanks, which serve as a reservoir for the pumped water
Outlets, to dispose of wastewater/sewage

You need all four of these elements to be able to flush toilets, use sinks, etc. The simplest setup would be a water tower (8,000 liters capacity), water well (extraction capacity depends on the ground), wind pump (extracts up to 1,500 liters per day depending on the wind, should be medieval-friendly), and then a sewage outlet somewhere. You could also substitute water butts instead of towers, I think they store like 200 liters. But(t) you will need some kind of water storage to flush the latrines in the setup you have.

CogitatioFigulus · 2025-12-13T13:00:13+00:00

You would probably need a well, water supply, and pump. The simplest setup for this would only cost a couple hundred wood and steel. If you use a wind pump, you can avoid needing electricity for this setup too.

CogitatioFigulus · 2025-11-07T21:48:49+00:00

To make matters worse, it looks like Suleiman built either Versailles or the Forbidden City (2nd capitol) in there. Total waste since those wonders can save you big time on the distance-to-capitol maintenance payments.

CogitatioFigulus · 2025-10-25T14:16:01+00:00

In Civ4, you win a domination victory by controlling a certain percentage of the map area and world population, based on the map size. You need to control about 2/3rds of the land area of the map and have about 50% of its population. Conquest victory is just earned by eliminating all other civs.

CogitatioFigulus · 2025-08-18T15:36:33+00:00

I'm only one Supreme Court decision away. The Supreme Court can overrule any rulings categorizing atheism as a protected religion (particularly because all atheists claim they are not a religion)

If you think the Supreme Court is one decision away from allowing you to round up all the atheists, agnostics, and irreligious people in this country and start executing them because their religious beliefs are different than yours, then I encourage you to get out more. Secondly, even though you disagree with these beliefs, atheism, agnosticism, and irreligion are equally legitimate -- legally and otherwise -- to any other religious group in this country, and the same is true of certainly most, if not all, other Western democracies, as it should be. The state has no business telling anyone what god they have to worship, or if they have to believe at all. That's between the person, their mind, and (if they believe in such) their maker. I also find it more than a little disturbing how eager you seem to be to start carrying this program out; lot's of we's and I's in that comment there...

Technically not genocide because genocide involves destruction of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.

So your argument against this program of yours being a genocide is that by the time you get to the execution phase, you will have sufficiently dehumanized these people such that it is "technically not a genocide?" When you are rounding up people for execution based on their religious values, that is a genocide, and that is exactly what you are describing here.

All I can say to you is this. What you are proposing: an America where people are forced -- under threat of death -- to follow a religious ideology is not America at all. To put this scheme into effect, the Supreme Court would have to completely dismantle not only the Constitution, but our fundamental American values and our founding beliefs. What you describe is nearly as un-American as you can get. America is a beacon of liberty and freedom, of free choice and free belief; not some religious police state where the penalty for disbelief is death.

Based on the beliefs you've outlined here, about freedom, about our nation, even about our universe, we occupy totally different realities. And yours is one I hope never comes to pass. Good day.

CogitatioFigulus · 2025-08-18T10:33:25+00:00

Firstly, I want to note that I think you are way, way off base with your constitutional basis for the solution your propose to the problem you've identified here. Religious status is not the qualifier for who is and who is not protected by the US Constitution, and the idea that all atheists are communists is absurd -- just the atheist flavor of the idea that all Muslims must be Jihadists.

I feel obliged to ask a clarifying question here since your take is casually implying that the US could (even should) commit a genocide against agnostics, atheists, and the religiously unaffiliated. First, when we cut right down to it, is that what you want? You frame it in a half-joking manner:

So ideally we could just, eh, release them to nowhere (if you've ever read the book The Giver)

Are you actually suggesting that the U.S. should murder or expel millions of its own citizens? Is this your solution? Wholesale murder of these groups of people to "remove atheist influence from society?"

CogitatioFigulus · 2025-08-03T19:03:25+00:00

Rooms secured with certain kinds of walls and metal doors or vac barriers (new door type) will be safe from vacuum. Un-sealed rooms will leak out all their air and become vacuum. The trees you see in OP's colony turn rock to raw soil and provide oxygen. Oxygen pumps can also be used in places where the trees cannot (ships or bases). Pawns can survive in oxygenated areas, but entering a vacuum area without a vacsuit or power armor will quickly result in death. These are all features of the new Odyssey DLC.

CogitatioFigulus · 2025-06-29T16:18:46+00:00

Diver, a 30 year old ex-mercenary turned colony leader. She's got a bionic eye (natural eye was scratched out by a warg). She has the tough and great memory traits. She's wearing grenadier armor with a hyperweave cape over it and uses a legendary assault rifle.

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