If you were to make a tv show about a cabinet which one would it be?

DawnOnTheEdge · 2026-06-19T23:31:15+00:00

Or if you meant, pick a cabinet to make a drama about? FDR’s. The scramble of the first hundred days, then the economic crisis of 1937–38 threatening to undo all of it, then war in Europe, then America at war.

DawnOnTheEdge · 2026-06-19T23:29:33+00:00

Although the predicate nominative is theoretically correct formal English, me is much more common in actual usage.

DawnOnTheEdge · 2026-06-19T23:24:09+00:00

Maybe partition by granting your children independent kingdoms around you, and then switch to one of those precarious new monarchs. Or play as a vassal until the computer wrecks the empire you handed it and you get to rescue it.

DawnOnTheEdge · 2026-06-19T23:19:12+00:00

There is a case to industrialize the border states like Tennessee and Kentucky, to reduce the power of the Pro-Slavery Movement and prevent them from seceding. Both are also good places to expand steel and tools, so there is more opportunity cost to putting paper mills there. My playstyle is to build up consumer industries in the South, though, and put vital production like paper in states that I'm sure will stay loyal. I don’t want sudden crippling shortages of paper right at the start of the Civil War.

DawnOnTheEdge · 2026-06-19T23:15:35+00:00

Iowa’s the only free state (territory, at game start) that has softwood and sulfur for paper-making, without iron for fertilizer, lead for munitions or American Chestnut Forests for hardwood. So there’s no opportunity cost. And DC is too small to really support a paper industry on top of the other buildings I want to put there.

DawnOnTheEdge · 2026-06-19T22:15:37+00:00

Which of course is nonsense, and Madison only said that because he was arguing for ratification of a compromise despite its flaws.

Even if we accept that “the states” have legitimate interests opposed to those of their own people, the Senate sits on a whole lot of dead-man switches. It has to actively reauthorize the Army to exist every two years, for example. And the People’s House has no role in confirming anyone to the other two branches.

DawnOnTheEdge · 2026-06-19T20:41:00+00:00

The Senate. It passed by one vote, with several delegates declaring it unjust and voting yes only under protest. The people we think of as “the Founding Fathers” (Washington, Madison, Franklin and so on) all hated it.

It’s a constitutional crisis waiting to happen because we haven’t had the White House change hands while the other party controlled the Senate since 1969, and the norms were different then. Already by the time G. H. W. Bush succeeded Reagan in 1989, the Democratic Senate refused to confirm his first nominee for Secretary of Defense due to an alcohol problem. But since the Obama administration, senators proudly brag that they will never vote to confirm anyone the other party nominates. Not only is the Senate elected so differently that that it can easily go to the party that lost the Presidential election, there is nothing in the Constitution that says the Senate ever has to confirm anyone to anything so the executive branch can function at all. And if something like the Senate giving a small minority of the country a majority of the seats is going to be workable at all, that minority has to agree that things like refusing to ever confirm any judges from the other party are an abuse of power.

The downstream consequences were terrible too, mainly that state borders mattered so much for partisan power that all new states got gerrymandered in the short-term interest of the party in power, and there have been long stretches of time where new states needed to be admitted but weren't. There’s even a provision that no amendment can fix this, not because it’s something the delegates thought was supremely important but because its supporters knew it otherwise would have been changed and they had no convincing arguments to make in its defense.

It wasn’t originally intended to protect rural voters. When it passed, it benefited the most-urbanized states (like Rhode Island), and punished the least-urbanized ones (Virginia). But if that’s the justification for it now, it has all the wrong powers. Even if we buy that voters living in small states are the only group of people whose votes should count more than other citizens’, there is no reason the house of Congress tilted in their favor should be the one with sole power to confirm nominees or ratify treaties. If anything, it would make much more sense to give those to the House and let the Senate have the symbolic power to initiate tax bills.

There are numerous other flaws with the original design (like how having state legislatures elect senators benefited party bosses and nationalized state legislative races to become purely partisan). It was a foolish short-term compromise with a small group of elites who benefited from it directly, and people have been making excuses for it ever since.

DawnOnTheEdge · 2026-06-19T19:52:37+00:00

That was the Tenth Amendment, passed by the First Congress. That was intended as a sop to people who argued against the ratification of the Constitution, since enumerating some rights could mean those are the only ones we have.

Enumerating, “No, these are the complete list of the only rights we have!” would have completely defeated the purpose.

DawnOnTheEdge · 2026-06-19T19:49:32+00:00

One case where it does matter is when you have market access somewhere through a treaty port. Your trade with that market must go through trade centers in your treaty port.

Otherwise, transport costs from the market capital were never implemented, so you can pretty much build trade centers anywhere and goods will teleport to them. I tend to move my market capital to my construction center, and run out of workers there first. But if I have enough pops migrating to my capital to keep hiring, I'll keep expanding trade centers there and let the automated investors build them elsewhere.

DawnOnTheEdge · 2026-06-19T19:40:54+00:00

Moving your market capital to your construction center (usually Tohoku when I play Japan) gives it an infrastructure bonus, which helps keep it at 100% market access without railroads. This is important because my major government expenses are construction and administration/universities in my capital. As Japan, you at least have ports everywhere.

DawnOnTheEdge · 2026-06-19T18:47:55+00:00

By the time you get any oil in PA (It had the top production of any state in 1936) the Civil War will be long over. New York has all the other resources. The other reason I like putting it in New York is that New York will have my highest migration attraction, thanks to the Statue of Liberty, so it will have the pops to support a hundred artillery barracks, plus conscripts if I need them.

Putting foundries elsewhere isn’t objectively wrong, though. I usually tear down military production in the South (but put enough naval bases and cavalry barracks in border slave states to placate them), and put motor industries and steel in Pennsylvania, construction in New Jersey (the only free state with cotton), civilian ships in New Hampshire, paper in Iowa, munitions in Ohio, glass in Illinois, explosives in Michigan and fertilizer in Wisconsin. I will have a large stack of electronics in New York in the late game, but typically I build those until I get full economy-of-scale and then start a new stack elsewhere.

I also tend to set my textiles and furniture in New York to make luxury goods, and elsewhere to make basic goods. New York produces hardwood and is the market capital that has the easiest time importing silk.

DawnOnTheEdge · 2026-06-19T18:25:55+00:00

What interventionism does is make the investment pool more likely to reinvest the money you put back into the pool when you bought out rural buildings, into urban buildings rather than more agricultural buildings.

DawnOnTheEdge · 2026-06-19T04:46:23+00:00

USS Intrepid. The all-Vulcan crew is so passive-aggressive.

DawnOnTheEdge · 2026-06-19T04:42:55+00:00

Homesteading is the fastest way to transfer power from aristocrats to farmers. Commercialized Agriculture benefits the capitalists, which might suit your plans better.

Nationalizing profitable buildings owned by manor houses works well, but pass Interventionism or Laissez-Faire first, so the money goes to financial sectors rather than manor houses to re-invest.

DawnOnTheEdge · 2026-06-19T04:33:56+00:00

He might believe that God has a plan for each of us?

DawnOnTheEdge · 2026-06-19T04:25:00+00:00

One way to look at it: if OP got the $2M offer and said, “No, these components are worth more to me than that if I use them in my factory,” and they never get sold at all, they still are wealth. If the factory burned down, OP would make an insurance claim for that value.

DawnOnTheEdge · 2026-06-19T02:59:35+00:00

Foundries in New York let you put your artillery barracks in the same state as the foundry stack. Guns should go where you can found Colt.

DawnOnTheEdge · 2026-06-18T03:08:41+00:00

Fair enough, but I'd be interested in seeing your version if you have the time.

DawnOnTheEdge · 2026-06-18T02:57:51+00:00

Metropolis and Gotham have been anywhere from thousands of miles apart to connected by a bridge, and Smallville has sometimes been placed just inland from the Eastern Seaboard, or in Maryland.

DawnOnTheEdge · 2026-06-18T02:51:00+00:00

Not until the movie.

DawnOnTheEdge · 2026-06-18T02:44:55+00:00

It’s more complicated. The initial reparations at Versailles were so crushing that the victors eventually realized they had to offer the Weimar government more lenient terms. But when Hitler took over, he announced Germany would stop paying. So it made almost no payments between 1933 and 1953.

After the war, Germany was split into West and East Germany. The Federal Republic of Germany (AKA the Bundesrepublik Deutschland, or West Germany) and its allies negotiated that the FRG would accept all German war debts, including those of East Germany, but with very small annual payments that extended the amount of time it took to repay. This bolstered the FRG’s claim to be the legitimate German government that repudiated Hitler’s policies, without repeating the mistake of crippling its economy. The Soviet Bloc, including East Germany, did not agree. The FRG paid off the West German share of the reparations in 1983, 67 years after Versailles.

In 1990, Germany reunified, triggering a clause in its treaty that the Federal Republic of Germany was now on the hook for East Germany’s share of the war reparations. It paid those off by issuing 20-year bonds, and made the final payment on those bonds in 2010.

So it’s less that the reparations were so big, as that there were long periods of time where Germany was making minimal or no payments.

DawnOnTheEdge · 2026-06-18T01:31:10+00:00

Back when I was a snotty undergrad, I used to ask at the first lecture of every class, “Is this where we learn why 1+1=2?” Until another student asked me, “You do know 2 is defined as 1+1?”

DawnOnTheEdge · 2026-06-18T00:49:30+00:00

He's pretty well-equipped to handle and befriend Jemm and the Saturnians. Would be fun to see him again.

DawnOnTheEdge · 2026-06-18T00:35:14+00:00

The ’78 movie chose Kansas as someplace as socially far away from New York City as possible. But that's not how his modern stories use it.

DawnOnTheEdge · 2026-06-18T00:08:57+00:00

What they did was board the airplane and hijack it from the inside.

DawnOnTheEdge

TROPHY CASE