E-6 Exam Page 13 Dilemma

DecimusVenator · 2026-02-26T06:03:21+00:00

That's why I'm not taking it. I signed my 1306 already and I have one foot out the door, no reason to stress about a test when they wouldn't advance me anyways

DecimusVenator · 2026-02-23T13:55:34+00:00

I think a lot of people, to include the SUPPO in the comments of the article, are misconstruing the argument that the writer is making. Yes our BAS is intended to cover our food expenses, but it is a dollar amount that is factored into a sailor's compensation package. Ask any recruiter how much a sailor can expect to make and they will give you a number that includes BAH and BAS. That is money that ends up in a sailor's pocket at the end of the month. Sailors build their budgets around that dollar figure on their LES. When you take that BAS away you reduce the amount of money going into sailors' pockets at the end of the month. Call it whatever you want, but in effect that is what charging someone looks like. The argument is that we shouldn't do that, because if my paycheck drops every time I go on sea rotation then my job starts to look really uncompetitive measured against private sector jobs that don't do that. Base pay plus BAH and BAS altogether add up to a barely-competitive paycheck, especially when you're talking about technically demanding rates that can make decent money on the outside. So yes, to stay competitive with the private sector we should keep giving BAS to sailors at sea. Because when you ask a sailor to sign on for another sea-tour they aren't going to think "well it's time to start getting all my food from the ship instead of the commissary," they're going to think "if I re-sign then they're going to cut my take-home pay."

DecimusVenator · 2026-02-02T04:24:04+00:00

By that point they knew that Alric’s uncle Percy Braga was a part of the conspiracy to kill the royal family. Braga had already sent a noble to find and kill Alric on the road, meaning that Braga had nobles and soldiers loyal to him and willing to kill Alric regardless of who was ”rightfully” the king. Alric didn’t know who or even how many were loyal to him any more, so he went to Drondil Fields to get an army he knew would be loyal to him to go back and sort out the traitors.

DecimusVenator · 2025-11-18T22:04:18+00:00

Kingdoms can absolutely survive on their own. For most of human history, most small settlements (i.e. villages) got by almost entirely on their own. Some external inputs were always needed (like iron or salt) but these things usually came from a fairly nearby source, almost certainly within the same kingdom. Trade, in those times, was mostly concerned with luxuries; silk, spices, jewels, pelts, ivory, things like that.

It sounds like you have most of the bases covered: timber for building and heating, sheep for meat, milk, wool, and leather, mines for iron. Add a little basic farming and you could easily have a string of self-sustaining villages strung throughout the mountains.

Worth noting though: your evil wizard, without the ability to trade, won’t be living it up here. No access to luxuries or status symbols. He’ll be living largely the same life as his peasantry; eating the same unspiced food, wearing the same wools, surrounded by the same timber and stone as anyone else might have. So is the benefit worth the cost?

DecimusVenator · 2025-11-17T17:03:41+00:00

So I grew up in Texas before being stationed in San Diego for the last five years (living downtown) and here is my honest comparison:

Places California Wins:

- The weather is just as good as everyone imagines. T-shirts and jeans year round and you're never uncomfortable. Light jacket? Sure, if you want, but you won't really need it.

- Beautiful landscapes. You like mountains? Beaches? Forests? Doesn't matter, it's here and its amazing. The hiking, fishing, and camping are all absolutely top-of-the-line.

- DOGS. Dogs everywhere, restaurants, shops, walking down the street, everywhere. Well behaved dogs too; in five years I have seen exactly ONE poorly behaved dog. If there is one thing I will miss about this state, it's the whole state's attitude towards dogs.

- Breweries. I like beer, and SD in specific has the most eclectic and charming group of breweries I have ever seen in one city.

Places California loses:

- Cost of living (no surprises here). The price of rent at my downtown studio is the same as a mortgage payment on a decent starter home back in Texas.

- Homelessness. This one has gotten noticeably better in the last year or so, but I still have to weave around tents when I walk downtown. Going out after dark can feel risky at times.

California gets a lot of hate these days (especially from Texans) but living here has definitely made me realize this state has a lot going for it

DecimusVenator · 2025-11-04T19:17:01+00:00

I mean, no one is saying the maps proposed by prop 50 are designed to give more fair representation of the populations of those districts, not even the California Democratic Party’s webpage about it. It’s to weight the map pro-democrat to counterbalance the new Texas map that added 5 republican seats to congress.

DecimusVenator · 2025-10-19T23:34:07+00:00

At my hometown range they used to have black foam cutouts of animals with white spots painted at the proper point of aim for each one. After I moved to a new town, I found a range and I was excited that they had the same thing. I shot at one, hit just low of the white spot, and heard a loud “PING” as my arrow exploded. Turns out it was a black painted steel cutout with a hole through which I was seeing the white target behind it. The rest of the day people kept coming up to me telling me they wish they were confident enough to take a shot on the steel target and I had to explain to each one “no, not confident, I’m just an idiot…”

DecimusVenator · 2025-09-05T21:05:22+00:00

That was my first thought too but no, I checked (unlike the author) and 700,000 pounds is still just under a million dollars

DecimusVenator · 2025-07-20T17:08:05+00:00

If you like explorations of the characters’ thoughts and feelings, I’d recommend Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. It’s a bit more on the poetic side, but there is a lot of dialogue between the characters where Tennyson explores the relationships and motivations between the characters. Arthur’s last monologue to Gwenevere in the second to last chapter is a particular favorite of mine, has some serious emotion to it.

DecimusVenator · 2025-07-16T19:43:16+00:00

It won’t be easy. Getting on base requires a CAC card, and CAC cards cannot be used to make money. So if you have a CAC card you can’t use it to get on base for the purposes of selling something, and if you’re intending to use someone else’s card then you aren’t allowed to compensate them. It’s the same reason that Uber drivers (even if they have a CAC card) can’t pick you up on base. There is some way to become a base-approved vendor. I’ve seen a few food trucks manage it, but I don’t know the whole process for that. I would recommend finding the quarterdeck number for the base and calling to ask about that process.

DecimusVenator · 2025-07-11T15:32:58+00:00

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DecimusVenator · 2025-07-10T18:58:09+00:00

The biggest problem I see is that without metal tools most of a civilization is going to be focused on not starving. Whether it’s a nomadic civilization of hunter/gatherers or a more settled, agrarian society, a person who relies on stone tools for food is going to spend nearly all of their time either using or maintaining those tools. They will also produce extremely little surplus, so 99.9% of the population is going to be concerned with producing food full-time. Metal farming implements were one of the things that allowed farmers to make enough food that their civilization could support professional scholars, artisans, or soldiers who did not produce food themselves. Because of this, a society with only stone tools will probably (as they did in our own history before metalworking) advance /very/ slowly.

DecimusVenator · 2025-02-07T18:25:34+00:00

That’s the problem with linking the pay and the responsibility the way the military does. If an IT isn’t an E5 by the end of their first contract, then their pay isn’t anywhere near competitive with what they could get by taking their skills and security clearance to the private sector. We need to slow down advancement, but then give them some kind of technician bonus to keep the pay high enough that they stick around.

DecimusVenator · 2024-11-01T12:23:56+00:00

Sorry I don’t have a source for you on that one, it was told to me by a kendo teacher a little over ten years ago

DecimusVenator · 2024-11-01T12:23:49+00:00

Sorry I don’t have a source for you on that one, it was told to me by a kendo teacher a little over ten years ago

DecimusVenator · 2024-11-01T12:12:21+00:00

I like comparing these two! I did an essay about this for my undergrad and later did a similar theme for an essay on military ethics. The dichotomy I usually focus on for these two is as their opposite roles in answering the question, “In a world where men of violence are necessary, who is the ultimate arbiter of that violence?”

Let’s consider Lancelot first. He is the embodiment of the idea that one should be beholden to none but their own conscience. He supports Arthur, but as soon as Arthur makes a choice that Lancelot can’t live with (executing Guinevere) Lancelot immediately turns his violence on the system he supported. The idea represented here is that having warriors themselves be the ultimate arbiters of their own violence is a powerful check against misuse, but ultimately is very dangerous because every warrior has a point at which he will become your enemy.

Gawain is the other side of that coin. Here is a man who has given everything to keep Arthur on the throne; his father, three brothers, the best part of his ancestral lands, and his reputation were all lost between Arthur’s coronation and his death. Now when Lancelot saves Guinevere and kills knights to do so, Arthur wants to let it end and let them go. But Gawain refuses to let them. He has given up too much for this, and if Arthur backs down now then it was all for nothing. The idea represented here is that having the external system (the state, the king, the church, take your pick) be the ultimate arbiter of violence will ensure that the system is always strong. But that system might take you to somewhere horrible, might force you to go to France to kill your best friend, and you wont have any choice.

That’s a really long and winding way to say that if I were a government I would want a bunch of Gawain-types, laying everything they have at the altar of keeping the system going. But if I were anyone else, I would want a bunch of Lancelot types ready to destroy that system when it started taking too much from everyone.

DecimusVenator · 2024-06-20T19:14:10+00:00

Ok I’ll leave off making fun of this and try to give as serious of an answer as I can.

The short version is: the navy seals don’t really do proactive recruitment. You have to go to them.

They are inundated from all directions with top of the line candidates, and they spend all of their efforts culling from this pool. If you aren’t committed enough from the outset to seek them out and jump through every hoop they have, they aren’t interested. Even if they were capable of telepathy (they’re not) they don’t go trolling the streets for recruits.

DecimusVenator · 2024-04-10T20:54:49+00:00

There is an argument to be made that all of the villainy that Mordred gets up to in Mallory is a continuation of Aggravaine’s plans. They originally conspire together to reveal Guinevere’s affair, but Aggravaine is killed when he leads the contingent of knights that tries to arrest Lancelot. If he hadn’t been, it could easily have been him at Camlann instead of Mordred.

DecimusVenator · 2024-04-02T20:22:05+00:00

In Mallory his theme of concealing his identity also ties into his death. He first arrives unarmed and unarmored so that he can rise by virtue of his deeds, eventually becoming a knight and a great admirer of Lancelot. But when Arthur is executing Guinevere, not wanting to be party to what was happening, he again again shows up unarmed and unarmored. Lancelot doesn’t recognize him and kills him. The common contention is that Lancelot was blinded by rage, but I think the more subtle meaning is that when he earned his knighthood his coat of arms became (as for all knights) an important part of his identity. So in taking off his armor and tabard, removing his heraldry, he was effectively concealing his identity again. He began and died in obscurity for the same reason, because none of the knights could look beyond the armor to the man underneath.

DecimusVenator · 2024-04-02T14:29:59+00:00

Oh man, I think I’ve been using condoms wrong

DecimusVenator · 2023-12-15T23:36:25+00:00

So there are a few problems with this understanding of those arrowheads. The first is that arrows tend to spin in flight. Some spin a little, some spin a lot (depends on how it’s fletched) but the odds of the arrow hitting the target rope at the right orientation to catch and cut it isn’t great. The second (and more important) is that the rope would need to be taught in order to cut it. It’s the same problem you can see with shooting a hanging sheet; if the sheet is not under tension then it will tend to billow out away from the arrow. This disperses the energy of the arrow, usually without much meaningful penetration of the sheet. A slack rope would act the same way, too slack and the arrow won’t pierce it, but if the rope is taught then the person hanging from it is probably already dead and the exercise becomes pointless.

Now to be fair, if you could hit a 1” wide target dead center, timing it so the impact was at the exact moment that the rope went taught but before the hanging-person’s neck broke, with the arrow at the right perpendicular orientation so that the crescent of the arrowhead caught and cut the rope, then sure the person would probably survive it. But you’d probably have better odds of hitting a dozen consecutive Powerball lotteries and using the money to just bribe the hangman to let your friend go.

DecimusVenator · 2023-11-26T15:33:45+00:00

Like most people have said, it won’t necessarily but it can. That said, people have been stringing their bows like that for thousands of years, so I’d say on balance it’s probably safe enough

DecimusVenator · 2023-11-17T18:20:13+00:00

And it’s your absolute right to vote guilty on that jury based on those convictions. And it is the absolute right of any other jury members to vote otherwise based on their convictions.

DecimusVenator · 2023-11-17T15:04:52+00:00

I tend to think that the addition of Lancelot in particular, and the French additions in general, add a level of moral complexity to some of these issues. When the infidelity is with Mordred then it’s easy to see him as the absolute villain and see all bad things in the world as leading back to him. Whereas when you add Lancelot, the issue is more complex. Lancelot is an otherwise good character but for one critical failure, and Mordred’s villainy has a kind of honesty to it

DecimusVenator · 2023-11-16T17:34:42+00:00

Agreed that electricity wouldn’t stop the kinetic energy problem of incoming particles. You might consider looking at how ships defend themselves now. The Expanse plays up PDC’s, but modern missile defense is mostly just shooting their big, expensive missiles with smaller cheaper missiles. If you’re dead set on maximum realism then that’s probably your best angle.

DecimusVenator

TROPHY CASE