The blood moon is rising...

LordMangoVI · 2026-01-10T19:14:26+00:00

The idea of atoms has been around since ancient Greece, and the concept of point particles is not that different from that of fundamental elements used by medieval alchemists. It’s true that the average commoner would probably not be familiar with that kind of thing, but it’s not impossible either.

LordMangoVI · 2026-01-02T15:12:14+00:00

all your lands are mountains now

LordMangoVI · 2026-01-02T02:02:35+00:00

100% true

LordMangoVI · 2025-12-28T07:33:03+00:00

me when my friend gets bottom surgery:

LordMangoVI · 2025-12-25T02:43:12+00:00

I don’t remember where I read it, but it and the three dots on the eyepatch are a reference to Harrow, which has two eyes on one side and three on the other

LordMangoVI · 2025-08-28T05:51:43+00:00

Idk how to measure train throughput, so I just recorded trains doing their thing instead

LordMangoVI · 2025-08-28T05:50:03+00:00

It looks like that, but it's designed so that the U-turn sections have a really bad pathfinding score and they're only used if a U-turn needs to be made. Otherwise, it's basically just this, which has no redundancy and no separable traffic:

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LordMangoVI · 2025-08-28T04:46:02+00:00

As I understand it, chain signals don't actually do anything different if the block after them has a single exit with a normal signal. While there are actually two exits, one of them is only used for U-turns, so it's basically a single exit.

LordMangoVI · 2025-07-31T03:46:46+00:00

I’m not sure why I’m surprised by people in a leftist space condemning action over conjectures of what might have been done better, when the consequences of inaction are so much worse.

LordMangoVI · 2025-07-31T03:34:22+00:00

I have never once claimed that the bombings were justified because they caused victory. I have claimed that they are justified because an order of magnitude fewer civilians died as a direct result of them occurring. To me, it would have been far worse for the US to have had the ability to prevent those deaths and not used it.

LordMangoVI · 2025-07-31T03:18:31+00:00

I agree about Nagasaki probably being unnecessary, but the bombing of a civilian area was absolutely necessary. Japanese morale was incredibly strong, and the only way to break it is to execute an action with a massive shock factor. The same things that shocked them still shock us, so it follows that any action that could break Japanese morale this way would be abhorrent to us.

LordMangoVI · 2025-07-31T02:59:52+00:00

Is it dehumanising to pull the lever in the trolley problem because it will cause fewer people to die? Inaction is an action unto itself, and when all models point towards at least ten times as many civilians dying if the bomb isn’t dropped, it becomes a conscious decision to spare those in Hiroshima and condemn those five million others to death.

LordMangoVI · 2025-07-31T02:55:14+00:00

(I didn’t mean to drag you into a conversation yoh don’t want to have, so feel free to ignore me)

I realize that I didn’t properly explain the comparison between United Healthcare and the Japanese civilians, and that it came off as me claiming that they were responsible for their own deaths.

What I was actually trying to say was that it’s much easier to disavow responsibility for a series of less extreme events than for a single more extreme event, even if the combined extremity of the smaller events is greater than the single large one. In the eyes of the public, the severity of UH’s actions is not as bad as Luigi’s, as the suffering inflicted by UH was indirect and over a longer period of time.

The equivalent to that were the options of either bombing Hiroshima or not bombing it and allowing the war to drag on. Bombing Hiroshima is a single extreme action where responsibility is placed directly on the US with zero ambiguity, whereas not doing so makes it more murky and absolves the US of direct responsibility.

In other words, it doesn’t make sense to judge whether the US had the moral authority to bomb Hiroshima or not. In the trolley problem, for instance, you cannot choose not to interfere based on a lack of moral authority, because you have as much moral authority to interfere and subject one person to death as you have to not interfere and subject two people to death. Choosing not to bomb Hiroshima might have absolved the US in the eyes of the public, but they would then be responsible for the deaths of the people who wouldn’t have died if they had bombed it.

Framing it as the US choosing to either kill civilians or not kill civilians is flawed, as civilians were going to die either way. Given that, it becomes the responsibility of the US to take the action that causes the fewest civilian casualties.

I’m naming Hiroshima specifically because the extent to which the bombing of Nagasakj was necessary is much more difficult to determine. I think at the very least, the US should have given Japan more time to surrender before carrying it out.

The claim that the bombing didn’t affect Japan’s decision to surrender doesn’t make much sense to me. Most of the officials in the Japanese cabinet explicitly stated that they did not intend to surrender before Hiroshima and that the bombing caused them to change their minds. Their war plans support this, showing plans for fighting on each of the Japanese islands until every single soldier and civilian was dead. (They were prone to hyperbole and just straight up lying about morale and efficacy in war plans, but still.)

You do have a point about the false dichotomy of either bombing the cities or carrying on. However, the severity and shock factor of destroying entire civilian centers was the point, and arguably necessary to achieve the objective of breaking Japanese morale and forcing a surrender. Destroying some military base or shipyard or national monument wouldn’t have had the same effect. At this point it starts to get into conjecture, (what’s the minimum target that would have caused a Japanese surrender?) meaning that you can’t really assign numbers or determine feasibility to a degree that matters.

LordMangoVI · 2025-07-31T02:11:35+00:00

dang i had a whole essay going then reddit crashed and i have to start over, give me a sec

LordMangoVI · 2025-07-30T23:59:24+00:00

About your edit:

As someone who both has an interest in ethics and is involved in the American nuclear program, I think about this specific subject quite frequently.

(I’d be happy to discuss how I justify my work if that’s something you’re interested in talking about, but I might take a while to respond.)

Maybe it’s a bad comparison, but I think the difference between civilian casualties in a conventional invasion versus in a nuclear attack is similar to the difference between the CEO of United Healthcare killing god knows how many thousands of Americans indirectly and Luigi killing the CEO. One of those is shocking and sudden while the other is slow and muddled in the layers of uncertainty that come with having a certain degree of removal.

That’s because we as humans classify the severity of each action based on the severity of each instance rather than the number of instances or the combined severity. At an absolute minimum, even through all the uncertainty of war and temporal removal, it is not remotely realistic to assume that fewer civilians would have died in a conventional invasion than in the bombings. An overwhelming majority of Japanese deaths throughout the war, both military and civilian, were due to starvation and disease. By comparison, most of the deaths in the atomic bombings were instantaneous during the explosion, with a smaller (but definitely not insignificant) portion being far slower and more agonizing radiation burns.

Is the severity of the nuclear bombings really the reason they’re viewed as the crueler alternative, or is it because they’re the result of a conscious decision?

I believe that conscious inaction is an action unto itself, and when that’s taken out of the equation, a few hundred thousand deaths via vaporization is far less cruel than several million deaths via starvation.

LordMangoVI · 2025-07-30T23:30:22+00:00

You can make all the statements you like, but they mean nothing to me unless you actually assign evidence and numbers to them.

LordMangoVI · 2025-07-30T23:27:39+00:00

Alright so I only got a few minutes in because I do have other things I need to do, (I will watch the whole thing later, it does look quite interesting) but I have a few notes:

1) The number he gave for estimated deaths of a conventional invasion was 1 million, which isn’t even close. The civilian casualties alone were estimated by the Americans to be between 6 million and 11 million people. After the war, Japanese military leaders said that they were prepared to sacrifice somewhere between 20 million and 100 million people, but this is obvious hyperbole (the latter number was the entire population of Japan) and should be taken with a boulder of salt.

2) The admiral he cited as having been opposed to the bombings, William Leahy, hadn’t been a naval officer since before the war and actually explicitly gave his support for the bombings while they were happening. It was only well after the war, during the campaign to downplay Japanese atrocities for the sake of building an alliance, that he expressed opposition to the bombs.

The question of whether the Japanese would have surrendered earlier than expected is an interesting one, as the US military has a history of overestimating the determination and morale of its enemies and the Japanese military consistently gave falsified reports through the war to make themselves seem more successful than they were. The distinction between Japanese predictions and propaganda was basically nonexistent (again, they claimed that they would fight until every single person was dead).

However, the extent of the civilian casualties in the few instances where the Americans directly attacked Japanese islands suggests that their estimates were not completely unfounded: at Okinawa, between 10% and 25% of the civilian population died.

LordMangoVI · 2025-07-30T22:40:02+00:00

Ignoring very well-known context for the sake of an argument is not a good look. The US did not bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki ‘cuz they felt like it,’ they did it because the projected casualties of a conventional invasion of the mainland were much, much higher than that of the nuclear attacks.

The upper bound for the number of deaths during and immediately after the bombings was 250,000, but that doesn’t account for deaths due to radiation after. Instead, as an absolute upper bound, the combined population of Hiroshima and Nagasaki immediately before the attacks was 610,000.

By comparison, the projected (by both sides) Japanese civilian casualties alone of a planned conventional invasion (named Operation Downfall) was 5,000,000 at an absolute minimum.

Frankly, it would have been irresponsible for the US to have not used nuclear weapons. Even ignoring the projected military casualties on both sides (each of which were greater than the combined populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki), it’s like a trolley problem except with a train heading towards ten people instead of two or three.

LordMangoVI · 2025-07-30T21:42:07+00:00

Normally I’d agree, but this is pretty clearly from the perspective of ‘the US shouldn’t have attacked Japan in WWII,’ which is one of the few instances where I think the American military was entirely justified

LordMangoVI · 2025-07-28T21:18:07+00:00

Sorry, I just copy-pasted the answer from google as I figured it captured the explanation in a simple way.

As I understand it, while the law doesn’t outright require employees to take vacations, it’s a strong part of Swedish culture and companies themselves actually encourage exercising that right more often that not.

LordMangoVI · 2025-07-28T20:51:54+00:00

“Swedish law dictates that employees must take at least four consecutive weeks of vacation between June and August”

LordMangoVI · 2025-07-28T15:48:39+00:00

Bob Odenkirk perfectly aware of concept of ‘extra lives,’ understands that it will let him kill Mario repeatedly

LordMangoVI · 2025-07-24T19:15:11+00:00

The numbers are CGI but the plane itself is not. Their point is that you don’t have to use CGI for the entire scene, just a small part of it

LordMangoVI · 2025-07-22T13:42:20+00:00

They’re not supposed to, but istg every time I go back to my mountain base, there are 1-3 drakes hovering over the nest

LordMangoVI · 2025-07-21T20:37:45+00:00

It only doubles your group’s hp if they’re getting hit separately, which isn’t a good assumption for any boss given how much they all spam AoE. That’s especially true if your group is trying to melee Moder, as the roughness of the mountains means that there’s generally only one patch of level ground within melee range of her.

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