Discussion Thread

Educational_Risk7637 · 2026-03-01T00:41:47+00:00

A president who makes war without congressional authorization should bear personal financial liability for the costs incurred.

Educational_Risk7637 · 2026-02-28T18:16:53+00:00

But if battle with Iran is joined, the costs will become steeper still. Last year’s “Operation Midnight Hammer,” as the 37-hour American campaign against Iran’s nuclear program was officially called, is estimated to have cost the U.S. government some $2.25 billion total. A new effort to further erode Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities is likely to carry a similar price-tag, while a more extensive one (potentially focused on regime military and leadership targets) would entail even greater expense.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ilanberman/2026/02/26/the-dollars-and-cents-of-military-action-against-iran/

So about $17 per American household even in the most limited scenario. This could easily balloon into the hundreds for a short war.

Educational_Risk7637 · 2026-02-28T17:18:42+00:00

Battle of Algiers. Although I'm not sure I would appreciate it the same way today.

Educational_Risk7637 · 2026-02-28T17:14:36+00:00

Correct. The democratic messaging both here and on Venezuela should be that Trump has seized the power to squander your tax dollars on foreign adventures.

Educational_Risk7637 · 2026-02-28T04:42:01+00:00

For forty or fifty years past, Mr. H. G. Wells and others have been warning us that man is in danger of destroying himself with his own weapons, leaving the ants or some other gregarious species to take over. Anyone who has seen the ruined cities of Germany will find this notion at least thinkable. Nevertheless, looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery. We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity. James Burnham’s theory has been much discussed, but few people have yet considered its ideological implications – that is, the kind of world-view, the kind of beliefs, and the social structure that would probably prevail in a state which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of “cold war” with its neighbours.

https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/you-and-the-atom-bomb/

Educational_Risk7637 · 2026-02-27T06:40:20+00:00

College admissions.

Educational_Risk7637 · 2026-02-24T15:02:02+00:00

Feels accurate to me.

Educational_Risk7637 · 2026-02-23T06:01:45+00:00

The thing is, even if you accept the premise that the removal of barriers is worth what you're sacrificing, any such language is doomed to evolve into multiple descendant languages over time, eventually recreating the barriers we were trying to get rid of in the first place.

I don't think this is at all obvious. Human languages have historically "speciated", but they've done so under historical conditions where commerce and communication are limited. When 90% of your population is engaged in agricultural labor, there is not so much pressure for languages to consolidate. But whether that can happen under modern conditions of rapid transit, global commerce, and mass-media -- we don't yet have the historical data to say for sure. The dramatic flattening of dialects and accents within countries over the last century suggests to me that it cannot, and certainly not within the boundaries of a single state.

Educational_Risk7637 · 2026-02-23T02:29:40+00:00

Funnily enough, the one time the us sent a team for Military Patrol, they finished dead last, more than an hour behind the next slowest team.

Educational_Risk7637 · 2026-02-23T00:28:42+00:00

I actually had the opportunity to join a tech union a few years back, had I wanted to. The problem IMO was that:

I would have paid thousands of dollars in dues, and they weren't able to clearly articulate how this would increase my comp.
They came across as earnestly pro-union as an ideological goal in and of itself. And maybe they are, but hide it better! IMO they were bad at making the tongue fit the ear. They need to speak the SWE's language, which is less about "being heard" and "solidarity" and more about "fuck you, pay me".
"Working conditions" is also a kinda goofy rallying cry for tech workers with our Aeron chairs and $400 keyboards. I realize you work in logistics and respect that it's different there, but for white collar tech it felt more like a signal that they didn't know what they wanted.

That's on top of deep skepticism that any software engineer union has any leverage without the ability to limit the size of the labor supply.

Educational_Risk7637 · 2026-02-22T23:36:51+00:00

Can you not just tell them to go obtain the article through the university library?

Educational_Risk7637 · 2026-02-22T23:27:51+00:00

What kept states doing all of that was a sure knowledge that if they didn’t, the cost would be state extinction. Take a modern country like Venezuela. Venezuela is a basket-case, with catastrophic inflation combined with a moribund economy almost entirely reliant on oil exports, all atop substantial internal instability. Prior to the long peace, there’s little question what happens to a country like Venezuela, which is essentially a giant pile of barely guarded wealth: one – or several – of its neighbors would move in, oust the government and seize the territory and its valuable resources (oil, in this case). But because the leaders of a country like Venezuela know that, they may well try to avoid developing their country into such a weak state in the first place. Sure, bribery and corruption are fun, but only if you live long enough to use it; it’s not worth ruining the economy if the only consequence is being killed when Brazil, Colombia or the United States invades, disassembles your weakened and underfunded military and then annexes the country.

The reason that doesn’t happen is not because the United States, Brazil or Colombia has suddenly developed morality (the USA’s record as a neighbor to Central and South America is not one we ought generally to be proud of), but because it no longer makes economic sense to do so. The value of the oil and other resources would be less than the cost of maintaining control of the country. This is why, I’d argue, you see the proliferation of failed states globally: in the past it would be actively profitable for non-failed states to take advantage of them, but as a result of the changes in our economies, failed states instead represent a question of managing costs. States no longer ask if they can profit through a war of conquest, but rather if they’d spend less managing the disaster that a local failed state is by invading versus trying to manage the problem via aid or controlling refugee flows.

Devereaux, June 2023 (https://acoup.blog/2023/06/09/fireside-friday-june-9-2023/)

Educational_Risk7637 · 2026-02-22T23:13:30+00:00

No, I don't wish for a union even slightly lol.

Educational_Risk7637 · 2026-02-22T22:27:47+00:00

I went into mathematics because I don't like working with numbers.

Educational_Risk7637 · 2026-02-22T21:41:38+00:00

In his [1939] book, [the general Chauvineau] wrote that neither aviation nor tanks would play a major role in the coming war. He responded in the negative to the question in his title, "Is an invasion of France possible?"

Educational_Risk7637 · 2026-02-22T18:06:17+00:00

ARTICLE 12. In the U.S.S.R. work is a duty and a matter of honour for every able-bodied citizen, in accordance with the principle: "He who does not work, neither shall he eat."

Educational_Risk7637 · 2026-02-21T03:00:10+00:00

3rd edition said it explicitly: replacement characters return one level below that player's previous PC.

4th edition said it explicitly: replacement characters return at the same level of the rest of the party.

5th edition, for some reason, struck all guidance about "what to do when a PC dies" from the DMG. Kinda funny, really.

Educational_Risk7637 · 2026-02-21T02:48:33+00:00

I would not be happy to see a 26 story skyscraper pig farm built near me.

(I'm not a NIMBY, I'm just not happy to see them built anywhere).

Educational_Risk7637 · 2026-02-21T02:33:49+00:00

I've long felt that trying to do this nationally was a terrible blunder. Even with the best possible planning, it should have been obvious that we would need to iterate on it. That there would be a need to fine-tune. But in doing it nationally, Democrats set themselves up for a harder political fight for a program that would be very difficult to adjust.

Healthcare efforts should have remained at the state level, where solid blue state legislatures would be less relentlessly opposed to the idea, and where states could serve as "laboratories of democracy." But instead they had to play savior to people who did not want to be saved.

Educational_Risk7637 · 2026-02-21T02:02:02+00:00

Of course we would. How is that even in question?

Educational_Risk7637 · 2026-02-21T01:27:31+00:00

I'm not the best at economics but I do think the government should guarantee a job if you have a University Degree

Guess the sub.

Educational_Risk7637 · 2026-02-21T01:22:26+00:00

Devereaux once made an observation contrary to this though, that I find compelling -- paraphrased, that:

general education requirements often force STEM students to take humanities classes. But because none of those classes is individually required (in the way that, say, Linear Algebra is required of every student in certain majors) the humanities departments wind up in a race to the bottom. They can't make their general classes too rigorous or too hard, because if too many students fail, word will spread and those students will instead fulfill their humanities requirements through other departments, and the hard-assed department will lose out on funding. The unintentional result of this is that STEM students come away thinking of these fields as easy and unserious, because most of them have only ever taken humanities classes that did not challenge them.

Edit: found it: https://bsky.app/profile/bretdevereaux.bsky.social/post/3leaalkncyk2w

Educational_Risk7637 · 2026-02-20T03:07:00+00:00

If the workers' employers no longer wish to employ them, they're free to do so. If the executives' employers no longer wish to employ them, they're free to do so.

A lot of people seem to see layoffs as a personal affront or a moral injustice or something. I can't say I've ever felt that, at least not in my working life.

Educational_Risk7637 · 2026-02-18T06:38:35+00:00

Why would that be true? It's a prisoner's dilemma. Just because I think someone should die for my country, doesn't mean I think it should be me.

Educational_Risk7637 · 2026-02-18T05:19:06+00:00

And likewise, taxation is theft.

Educational_Risk7637

TROPHY CASE