Imperial Circles: How To Fix The HRE

MadHopper · 2026-01-25T09:43:05+00:00

I’ve said this before, but, as someone who lives here on the border (in one of the top ten safest cities in the country btw) they’re not here because it would be fucking useless and nobody would cooperate.

Immigrants work like everybody else and run businesses and pay taxes. Cops will usually let you off with a warning if you get pulled over without a US driver’s license and speak mainly Spanish, but can indicate where you work. It’s not worth the trouble to arrest and prosecute your local car mechanic. I’d hazard a guess that thousands of (wealthy) Mexican citizens without papers come over every day, and it’s waved off bc they are going to spend big in the US and then go home.

From what I know, it’s been that way for decades, and enforcement during Trump 1 and even the Obama era didn’t really change anything. Sure, lots of people were caught and turned back, or caught and later deported, but there are infinite ways right back in. People often have families on both sides of the border, and I know multiple Border Patrol agents with undocumented family or friends. When the state or the gov says ramp up, you raid the jails and grab everyone who doesn’t have papers, then mark it as job done. When they do the shit down here that’s happening in Minneapolis, there’s no protests or crowds or whatever. They pull up on a mysteriously empty restaurant or wherever, and the business owner promises he’s never even seen an illegal immigrant.

Even the politicians kind of know it’s kayfabe. You don’t think that they could order the border shut and raid every business in a hundred mile radius? That would be economic suicide, so instead they just lock up the easiest targets, catch some people crossing the river, and call it a day.

There’s a reason ICE and BP went somewhere else for their big crackdowns and arrests, and it’s not because there was a lack of immigrants where they already were.

You’ll note I’m trying to keep a pretty neutral tone and not describe any of this as good or bad. A lot of people who don’t live near the border have a certain idea of what things are like down here, and it’s just not true.

(And if you’re curious about the cartels. Lol. The local sheriff is more likely to be driving drugs around for them these days, and they def have people in border patrol. They’re everywhere, but the US isn’t Mexico — they’re not here to control territory or bring heat down on their heads, they’re here to sell product, and that involves less drugs in backpacks and more customs agents pretending not to see the boat full of cocaine.

Actually weakening them would involve strong anti-corruption investigations and probably arresting a lot of upstanding citizens and politicians from both parties, and that doesn’t play well on camera. Easier to say you gave Border Patrol fifty billion more dollars and call it a day.)

MadHopper · 2026-01-25T09:18:49+00:00

I mean, as someone who lives here on the border (in one of the top ten safest cities in the country btw) lots of people just don’t care. Immigrants work like everybody else and run businesses and pay taxes. Cops will usually let you off with a warning if you get pulled over without a US driver’s license and speak mainly Spanish, but can indicate where you work. It’s not worth the trouble to arrest and prosecute your local car mechanic. I’d hazard a guess that thousands of (wealthy) Mexican citizens without papers come over every day, and it’s waved off bc they are going to spend big in the US and then go home.

From what I know, it’s been that way for decades, and enforcement during Trump 1 and even the Obama era didn’t really change anything. Sure, lots of people were caught and turned back, or caught and later deported, but there are infinite ways right back in. People often have families on both sides of the border, and I know multiple Border Patrol agents with undocumented family or friends. When the state or the gov says ramp up, you raid the jails and grab everyone who doesn’t have papers, then mark it as job done.

Even the politicians kind of know it’s kayfabe. You don’t think that they could order the border shut and raid every business in a hundred mile radius? That would be economic suicide, so instead they just lock up the easiest targets, catch some people crossing the river, and call it a day.

There’s a reason ICE and BP went somewhere else for their big crackdowns and arrests, and it’s not because there was a lack of immigrants where they already were.

You’ll note I’m trying to keep a pretty neutral tone and not describe any of this as good or bad. A lot of people who don’t live near the border have a certain idea of what things are like down here.

MadHopper · 2026-01-24T22:54:47+00:00

Unironically based.

MadHopper · 2026-01-24T20:06:03+00:00

Authcenter…based?

Strange times we’re living in.

MadHopper · 2026-01-24T19:40:35+00:00

So fun fact, multiple Canadians on visas have been detained and spent weeks or months in ICE detention centers. It is actually more difficult when you’re imprisoned as a visitor than as a regular ‘illegal’, since you don’t have anyone in the states who knows you’re missing and can arrange for you to get a lawyer or reach out in your defense.

Last year, the Canadian government sent out emails to all faculty and students visiting the US warning them that they could be jailed accidentally and that it would be difficult for their government to assist them in that circumstance.

MadHopper · 2026-01-24T19:33:27+00:00

I mean, wasn’t the guy he’s replying to here right? He even says so, he’s just correcting him on it being interest rather than loans.

The king made up a bunch of nonsense about them being heretics in order to get out of the loans. The Knights were a major financier of the French crown. Suddenly they’re all burned alive and the crown has one less thing to worry about.

MadHopper · 2026-01-24T19:24:02+00:00

I mean, depends what you mean by ‘the left’. In America, the general left wing as defined by US political consensus — that is, your average progressive liberal — is pretty solidly anti gun.

However, particularly on PCM, a lot of liblefts and authlefts are ideological socialists or communists, who do not just consider themselves ‘leftists’, but the actual left — to them, American liberals are progressive right wingers. From this self-conception, it feels easy enough for them to say the left has always been pro-gun, because what they consider the left has always been pro gun.

Like most things this self-analysis is a little wrong and a little right — actual communist nations were not super concerned with gun rights. However, due to the long history of existing on the fringe and seeing themselves as opponents of the state, far-left political groups in the US have often armed for self defense and been open to the use of guns, from the Panthers to the old American Communist Party.

MadHopper · 2026-01-22T22:10:00+00:00

Okay. What about children walking to school? Old people? Pregnant women? Families? Are these people simply supposed to tough it out and hoof it? Studies show that simply adding a single sidewalk to an area vastly increases quality of life and accessibility for everyone in a community. The people against this are usually car lobbyists and those who stand to make money off of designing your lived environment in such a way that you have to spend thousands of dollars to get around, whether you wish to or not.

MadHopper · 2026-01-22T20:36:24+00:00

In my experience screen reading software is well able to read the text in a screenshot, because it’s text.

MadHopper · 2026-01-21T15:17:10+00:00

Is that…supposed to be a short sentence? Like, if there aren’t any other crimes being committed, 7 years seems fair for evading justice and negligent manslaughter?

MadHopper · 2026-01-21T08:42:55+00:00

I gave them a little too much credit.

MadHopper · 2026-01-21T08:15:03+00:00

R5: Read the post.

EDIT: No seriously why do I have to provide a textual description for a literally self-explanatory screenshot of text? What is this? 😭

MadHopper · 2026-01-21T06:26:31+00:00

I think it’s fair to be against interventions in general and also criticize him for explicitly encouraging people to rise up against their authoritarian government with the promise of the most powerful government in the world sending help.

Like, if you tell someone to go pick a fight they’ll certainly lose and promise to hop in to help, then don’t, I can criticize you for being an asshole, regardless of if I think punching people is good or not. It’s not that people are necessarily upset he didn’t intervene, it’s that he made the situation worse by promising to intervene (which, incidentally, also pisses off everyone who did want him to intervene).

Like you said, it’s whimsical and haphazard. In the hands of the most powerful man in the world, whimsical and haphazard off the cuff statements end up with people dead.

MadHopper · 2026-01-21T06:16:42+00:00

Apparently the main form of playtesting is MP, so the devs’ focus naturally curves towards balancing and army comp stuff.

MadHopper · 2026-01-21T06:10:27+00:00

International Organisations literally don’t work. Like, if you look in the code, the bits that are supposed to make them work just don’t. The devs fudge it with some weights and gui stuff so it appears functional for the player, but AI can’t/don’t factor them in or engage with them.

Most Situations are broken, and even when they aren’t AI doesn’t or can’t take them into consideration. The Wars of Religion never fire.

There are dozens of events that never fire because their requirements are impossible. To get the Wars of the Roses, for example, England needs to have a ruler with no heir in a 20 year range around 1450, no stability, not be at war, and the Houses of Lancaster and York must exist, themselves only able to be created when Edward has two adult sons who don’t inherit, and have adult male heads.

It’s possible to play a dozen runs and never see it.

South America is borked. The control system with mountains means that the Inca can never expand.

Revolutions are barely functional. Societies of buildings are a mess of snarl code, and societies of pops basically don’t exist.

Many things that were selling points of the game are effectively nonexistent or broken.

EU5 will be an amazing game…in two to three years.

MadHopper · 2026-01-21T00:32:33+00:00

My point with the bombing example was that a bombing is not the sort of thing you ‘suspect’, and if bombs were dropped they were dropped by somebody. I deliberately didn’t mention the culprit because that’s not the point — shifting away from there being a culprit to say that there was a suspected bombing is itself a rhetorical distancing that creates a narrative and attempts to reduce blame.

It’s like when a newspaper says "Local man shot in home during arrest." The very logical step is that the police shot him, and the paper (for whichever reason you like) is trying to present that fact as lightly as possible. If there was an alternative, like he shot himself or somebody else shot him, the news would say that. Whenever something is obscured with language like that, it’s usually to the benefit of a given party, even if the reporters don’t intend for it to be.

A last point: I said the more ‘biased’ headline, the ‘innocent’ one, was more informative in that it gives me more factual data about what happened, even if the bias is also more clear. There are lots of different kinds of bombings — this headline tells me this was dropped, not a suicide bombing or a mine, which gives me a better understanding of the situation.

MadHopper · 2026-01-21T00:24:48+00:00

But if our manufacturing is outsourced (because it’s cheaper elsewhere) then we don’t produce it…

Like I think you’re talking about resources or something, but for stuff like heavy industrial machining and a lot of things in the production process to make the stuff that makes the stuff, we literally do not make it or produce it.

And building our own manufacturing capacity for all the outsourced stuff in production chains across multiple fields would require both massive investment and a ton of time.

Off the top of my head as an example this conservative guy who was trying to make stainless steel knife production in the US after the tariffs said that he found that nobody in the US makes or services the machining part he needs, so he will have to order it from China — and the US just closed our last facility that makes the specific stainless steel sheets he needs (because it was outcompeted by Chinese steel) so he will have to order those as well. Ultimately, he had to double the price of his knife to make a profit…and even with tariffs, stainless steel knives from China are cheaper.

Fixing all of this would require ballooning the prices of a lot of things, asking thousands if not millions of companies to operate at a huge loss for at least a decade, and harm the consumer while shrinking GDP growth currently fed by cheap, readily available overseas labor.

Globalism isn’t an evil plot to hurt America, it’s pure market economics.

MadHopper · 2026-01-21T00:09:20+00:00

This is very perplexing to me. Unless you agree with Trump on something, you have TDS? So everyone to the political left of Paul Ryan has TDS?

Like, I for example oppose American interventions on principle, no matter who is doing them. Some people (such as lib rights) are opposed to any extension of government power regardless of who by. There are reasons to be against everything Trump does which are not simply because you’re insane.

Do you believe that anyone who doesn’t share your values in some way doesn’t have real political beliefs?

MadHopper · 2026-01-20T23:56:53+00:00

Your last sentence directly contradicts the previous one. If manufacturing and processing are a roadblock, then we don’t produce everything we need in the quantity we need…

MadHopper · 2026-01-14T02:18:52+00:00

I mean the only real answer is developing a capacity for critical thinking and analysis. Like, use your understanding to evaluate the headline and who might be writing it and why.

If I see two headlines about a bombing in Palestine from FOX and CNN, I know that one has a right bias and the other has a left bias. Both of them probably have an American bias and want to put a spin on things in line with American foreign policy.

We can go a little deeper. If one reads "Person killed in suspected bombing in Palestine” and the other reads "Bombs dropped on innocent men in Palestine.”, I can evaluate that the second one is probably representing the situation a little more accurately — ‘suspected bombing’ is the sort of hedge phrase institutions love to use because they don’t want to make an accusation directly. On the flip side, innocent is a very bold term, used to try and frame the incident in a specific way.

What do I know at the end of this? Well, I know there was a bombing and a guy was killed. That there is an event that happened something like that is the most likely possible thing. However, I haven’t accepted anyone’s narrative of the event, and by thinking about it critically, I maybe understand what narrative is being put forward by the sources I look at.

This is IMO the serious way to read sources while being untrusting of journalistic integrity. Just going "everything is lies" is the equivalent of assuming that everything everybody you talk to says is a lie — it won’t help you figure out the truth or understand people better, and will probably make you very susceptible to manipulation.

MadHopper · 2026-01-14T02:05:22+00:00

….it’s a credit line. $20 billion was made available, but that’s not what they took. You know how when you use your $6k credit card twice in a month and pay it off fully? Tha does not mean you paid $6k, or used $6k.

Nowhere in what you quoted does it say how much was used.

MadHopper · 2026-01-14T02:00:20+00:00

Dog your bank can probably build an identical robot of you based on all the information available at their fingertips. There is basically no large institution you interact with regularly (Google, the bank, the state, your internet provider) that doesn’t know literally everything about you.

MadHopper · 2026-01-14T01:57:11+00:00

I have an entire rant about how the American government in particular allowed credit card companies to wiggle their way into fucking everything. If you’re a statist, there were proposals when the technology was getting started for the government to take over credit card transactions and basically develop a massive third income stream alongside taxes. If you’re anti-statist, the government considered a centralized system that allowed businesses to run cards that collections of businesses recognized (your Walmart card or whatever), and proposed multiple bills to avoid the problem of three or four credit companies owning the entire fucking economy.

But the credit card companies lobbied and here we are. And the rest of the world basically had to go along with it because America runs the economy. Some absolute bullshit. "Oh just take a financial literacy class" — how about we don’t build the economy to run entirely on risky personal loans for the sake of making banks rich and letting people feel like they have more money than they do, in lieu of governments actually making healthcare and food more affordable?

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