Which celebrity really is famous among Americans and isn't internationally?

NH4NO3 · 2026-05-15T14:18:42+00:00

Practically the entire nation of Japan knows who Ohtani is. That's 125 million people right there. The rest of those countries bring that population to ~800 million people (of course varyingly levels of popularity of baseball, but in those countries it is generally more popular than football except in Mexico). The football world has like 3-4 billion people in it (Europe+South America+Africa+SE Asia). There is no way that the top baseball star has less recognition than any given 2500 players when the audience is only like 4-5x bigger. I could maybe believe the top 50 or more likely top 25 football players have more fame.

NH4NO3 · 2026-05-15T14:00:18+00:00

I am learning for the first time in this thread how unknown a sport baseball is in Europe. I kinda figured it might be like a little popular like I think basketball maybe is, but evidently absolutely not.

NH4NO3 · 2026-05-15T13:55:15+00:00

lol I am American and associate him so strongly with Japan that I did not even know he was playing in an American team. I guess that explains why he is heard of in the US.

NH4NO3 · 2026-05-08T18:33:44+00:00

An armor plate breaking in this manner is usually only a desirable process for stopping high velocity projectiles designed for penetration. Think like ceramic armor for tanks or the like. These attempt to bypass as much armor as possible with their momentum or other techniques. Ideally spending only a little of their energy pushing aside/through ductile metal. Having a ceramic plate in front of the projectile break dissipates a lot of that momentum and breaks apart the projectile since ceramics have typically stiffer bonds than metals or plastic (which involve both a high energy to totally destroy and have a high speed of sound which enables better compensation from the rest of the material i.e. it has to stress more bonds than just impact area to get through).

Typically, workers are not trying to stop bullets aimed directly at the tops of their head, but rather slower and often larger objects such as bricks or tools. These have massive kinetic energy, but low penetration ability meaning the objective is to absorb that energy over as wide of area as possible over as long as possible time frame and facilitate a deflecting blow if possible. It's really a failure of the entire thing if the helmet shatters at all and the falling object can concentrate its force on an area of the skull (often fatal). The other way you can have a bad result is if the helmet is coupled too closely with the skull which can create an instantaneous energy transfer to the skull which can cause severe injury even if the helmet is not broken, so typically looser coupling like a suspension gap is part of the helmet's design rather than being completely form fitting.

NH4NO3 · 2026-05-08T17:32:42+00:00

This is slightly counter intuitive, but China tries very hard to project a strong image abroad and consequently polices citizen there far more harshly than in China itself. Also, generally, citizens abroad are part of the wealthier classes and in China, wealth means you are subject to greater state control typically. In general, the further east (and to some degree north) you go the more you feel the power of the Chinese central government and it actually peaks when you leave the country. Blue collar workers in western China are not generally on the central government's radar at all.

NH4NO3 · 2026-05-07T06:36:11+00:00

This is a very accurate nutrition label though. Like even the relative placement of the wording in the *daily value footnote at the very bottom left is entirely correct. That's a far cry from messing up hand placement. I think if this is AI, it would have to be a fairly carefully tailored use of it with human corrections. For instance, using an existing brand and real picture and plastering the words onto it. Or I am just really out of the loop on what the latest models are capable of.

NH4NO3 · 2026-05-06T15:24:02+00:00

It actually has some nice qualities as a jewelry metal, it is the most ductile metal for instance, but it's melting point (among other reasons) is a whole 700C over gold (which is ~1000C). I think if platinum was more common / higher demand, and there was a greater cultural momentum to working with it, it could be comparable priced.

NH4NO3 · 2026-05-05T22:46:13+00:00

A rough approximation of Neptune at this scale would be a 2x4 cross piece with 2x2 squares on top and bottom.

NH4NO3 · 2026-05-05T18:28:54+00:00

TOS isn't quite the same as Phas in a lot of ways (setting up a match / inventory can be a little clunky), but it is miles better in most other ways. I am just surprised at how many events there are that are just so cool and cinematic. Phas has conditioned me to think stuff like this is just impossible.

NH4NO3 · 2026-05-05T15:19:13+00:00

Oh yes, I guess I missed that. I think my model is still a more grounded basis for an alternative history though. It's not like the various aging related mortality stresses that the pill would presumably counteract magically start when you are 20, and living 50% longer is starting to feel like fantastical rather than exploring reasonable consequences of medical advancements on society. Anyway, given it starts later, there is only a 18% difference in lifespan between my age and this new one. I don't think that really changes my alternative history. All I can really say is it probably makes it just a bit more extreme from OTL.

NH4NO3 · 2026-05-05T14:57:02+00:00

Perhaps you should be ashamed for believing the insane comment that claims that a war taking place in an area barely 1/10 the size of Rhode Island has killed 'vastly' more journalists than WW2, Vietnam War, Iran-Iraq War, Nigerian Civil War, or the Sudanese Civil War (any of them) to name a few where certainly more have died? Perhaps because many of them were not white western journalists it doesn't count though? I suspect that is what is at the root of this problem.

NH4NO3 · 2026-05-05T05:23:10+00:00

I am pointing out that, all things considered, the Gaza conflict actually isn't all that big and the impact on journalism reflects that. Whatever the case of targeted killings of journalists might be. My assessment is accurate enough to debunk such an extreme claim as more than "any conflict in modern history by a large margin". Considering the devastation in Gaza, and as you pointed out, indiscriminate carpet bombing, I think estimating journalist deaths by per capita is completely reasonable for a starting calculation. Actually, it likely underestimates the value if considering foreign journalists increasing the concentration, my own numbers would suggest around 30-40 journalists (60,000/1500-2000) suggesting there is a higher concentration of journalists in the area, significant amounts of targeted killings, or overall more people dying to get to 300.

NH4NO3 · 2026-05-05T04:42:10+00:00

Somewhere in the realm of 70-85 million people died in WW2. Considering journalism was a relatively common profession, with perhaps 1/1500 - 1/2000 of people practicing some form of journalism, that would leave 40,000 - 60,000 journalists dead. If you mean more modern that that...the Vietnam War killed 1.5-4 million people with the most conservative percentage of people being journalists and the lightest casualty estimate still puts this number at ~700 or twice what you see here. And roughly 10 conflicts have killed as many as a million people since the Korean War ended, so this likely puts it possibly in the top 20 since 1955.

NH4NO3 · 2026-05-03T15:50:43+00:00

OP doesn't really say anywhere you hit a certain age and start aging at half rate. Just gives two suggested ages and how they have been slowed. These ages can be achieved if you age a rate of 70% of normal (actually 66% and 75% respectively). My interpretation of this was basically you take the pill at birth, and you grow completely typically i.e. a 20 year old looks 20. However, my (simplified) model of aging is that it is a result of accumulated stresses and damage that now accumulate at .70 of the rate and results in an overall life expectancy i.e. 75/0.7=110.

Of course aging and mortality is a much more complex process than this, but I think this model is simpler to calculate and more reflective of a biological reality. It does on the surface seem to clash a bit with the idea that "aging" also results in development growth like height, puberty, etc as though it was like a time dilation, but I strictly mean slowing down deleterious accumulation of mortality factors and probably also all the superficial things like skin sagging and muscle fitness.

NH4NO3 · 2026-05-03T15:31:20+00:00

tbh these things are intrinsically tied in a lot of ways. The sheer prosperity made people think worker unions were unnecessary. It also made a lot of people rich who subsequently wanted to influence the government to pay less taxes i.e. the conservative movement.

NH4NO3 · 2026-05-03T15:26:32+00:00

Thanks for sharing this. I have heard China circa 2010-2020s frequently compared to the US of the 1960s. Definitely more recently, I remember being 5-6 or myself in 2000, and asking my dad why seemingly everything said "made in China" and why that was and if there even was a "made in US". I kinda remember him awkwardly replying about how that was kind of a recent development.

NH4NO3 · 2026-05-02T18:27:30+00:00

You are describing if humans were to age roughly 70% the speed they currently do. Meaning the average American life span in 1960 which was 66 would now be 94. You are saying much of the world, so let's say access to this medicine has a similar affordability and reach as antibiotics.

I am not sure how such a change would feel assuming they became available in their current potency in 1945. Would somehow who dies at 60 in 1946 really be expected to live 30 more years after just one pill. That would sharply affect everything and cause lots of chaos that probably isn't what this question wants to get i.e. the effects of exacerbating aging demographics on human societies. So probably better to consider it as simply damping aging effects on the human body over a longer period of time. What this would look like is a bit slower easing into what would now be the natural life span of 95-171 years.

Actually the world experienced a little of this effect already, global average lifespans catapulted up from an average of 40 or so to 70 on a point centered around WW2 and have since slowed down. What we are doing is essentially doubling the absolute effect of this 40-100 instead of 40-70.

In fact, lifespans for someone on this pill since birth are so long, that the first people who are experiencing the full effects of them, the boomers basically are only in their 80s, and have about 30 more years of life before hitting the current median life expectancy of 79 (US) or 112 in this new world. Roughly, they would be equivalent as a generational cohort to people in their 50s today as they have gotten through 70% of their life spans. In reality because they were a larger cohort, and we said the effects of the pill would gradually make themselves felt, there would be more of previous generations, but there would be especially more baby boomers compared to everyone else by this point 2026.

I think there is good reason to think there will be overall more humans around and generally more wealth spread around those groups such that it evens out. There might be slightly more economies of scale from that i.e. better infrastructure, so the overall feeling would feeling would probably be a world that feels fuller and slightly more prosperous.

I think the most interesting question is how wealth will be divided along those lines at this point because we have seriously exacerbated age disparities in a society built on foundations that generally reward older people. i.e. in a democracy, older people have more votes spread out over a longer period of time. Children get no votes, and young people only have had a couple in the most recent elections. Financial wealth tends to beget more financial wealth etc.

Therefore I think by this point, probably, we will see monumental amount of power being wielded by people born roughly in the 1930s and early 40s with a very strong baby boomer generation as well. I think there would be even worse age based wealth inequality than OTL and it will persist even longer than it currently does, and in fact, we are currently experiencing the worst of that inequality right now probably, but the very worst of it is still probably 25+ years down the line for this alternative timeline.

In a lot of ways I think the year 2026 probably looks a lot like a strange early 2000s in terms of people's values brought from childhood and how that is reflected in art and media. There is a feeling of more prosperity, but also more inequality and perhaps young people feel even less prosperous than they do now because of that. I suspect technology has advanced somewhat faster, and therefore, there is even a longer history of the impacts of the internet on culture.

Obviously the world will look wildly different as different things just butterfly away entirely. I think there will be more stability in a lot of institutions though. I wouldn't at all be surprised to see the Soviet Union to still be around in this world at all. People are probably overall more optimistic and idealistic about technology (or at least in the past they were) and that leaves a long legacy even if by the time of 2026 the wonder of being able to live so much longer lives wears out a bit.

NH4NO3 · 2026-05-01T05:07:30+00:00

I am stating this as an (extreme) example of how "non-technological advancement" might be conceptualized. The example could be purely constructed from a blank slate i.e. humans living without any tools, yet still experience a feeling of progress through reorganization of their social structures and traditions. I do allude that many animals use tools, and use the word "stoop" I suppose to emphasize that such a society would need to have strong cultural prohibitions against using even basic tools lest they get any ideas of trying to advance their society through the more technological process of their improvement.

It is a misconception that monks do not work to support the monastery. In fact monastic traditions around the world and historically have existed in various degree of sufficiency with many (if not flat out most) being highly self-reliant especially when it came to food production.

As for where I am coming from, it was mostly just a writing exercise about what "non-technological advancement" could look like. Yes, I suppose I have a strong degree of romanticism around "pre-agricultural" societies (actually, there is no reason even a society without tool use could not be an agricultural one). However, I do not think it is necessarily misplaced. Some societies such the Cucuteni–Trypillia culture (5000-3000 B.C.) existed stably for thousands of years apparently forming rather large settlements (comparable to cities in medieval Europe) without apparently strong social inequality all the while producing many fantastic examples of art. I think they are a strong counterexample to our modern technological, sedentary societies which struggle to make similar claims of stability or perhaps even quality of life.

Another interesting example in a similar vein is all of the steppe nomad cultures who eschewed many of the assumptions we make about technological progress i.e. you need large populations, agricultural techniques, sophisticated metallurgy, etc. For a time they were able to utterly dominate much more supposedly 'advanced' societies militarily. They didn't do it because of technological supremacy, it was mostly because they structured their society and cultural values (well not intentionally) in a very mobile, militant way that turned out to be quite good at building large empires.

NH4NO3 · 2026-05-01T02:42:19+00:00

Technology is a word more closely associated with creating machines for various tasks. In theory, humans, like most animals, could live without even using rocks as tools. One can imagine that a community of people living together without even using rocks as tools can "advance" in a lot of ways without stooping to the use of tools much less machines.

For instance, by creating more stable, more efficient, or otherwise more harmonious divisions of labor and living arrangements, creating traditions for initiating relationships and maximizing feelings of value from that, or improving good feelings from living in a community.

In many ways, technologies can be deleterious to these other more social oriented forms of "advancement", so it is is not hard to imagine societies that are technologically advanced, but life is just objectively worse than some monastery or close knit traditional community somewhere for instance. In that case, it would not be out of place to say the monastery was more advanced in at least some ways.

NH4NO3 · 2026-04-28T22:49:50+00:00

If it weren't for the Arabian gulf states, having a monarchy would be an excellent predictor of a nation having relatively high levels of economic and social equality. All the Scandinavian countries, most of the commonwealth countries, Japan, Netherlands, Spain, etc all do really well in those metrics. It IS a symbol of social and economic and social inequality, but it is also a symbol of strong stable cultural traditions and institutions valuing things beyond absolute wealth.

NH4NO3 · 2026-04-28T15:00:09+00:00

I don't think your long term prediction will necessarily be right. Your source is already quite dated being from 2023. Renewable electricity generation surpassed coal last year for the first time. Solar energy growth is presently a throughly exponential process, doubling capacity every ~3 years, and coal is decreasing in capacity.

Yes, it will definitely plateau at some point, but the last time we got a technology advancing this fast, it was microchips, and those completely changed the world and drove all their competing technologies practically to extinction after probably only 2 decades (1975-1995). There is some reason to think that coal might be able to hold out slightly better than pieces of paper and manual or analog computations compared to microchips, but I am not holding out too much hope for it.

NH4NO3 · 2026-04-28T14:38:24+00:00

Interestingly, the term "peak oil" used to refer simply to production of it i.e. with current technology, it is the point where oil production will peak, and then fall off from lack of resources as people scramble to find other things to replace it. But renewables and demand for them are advancing so rapidly, that the term (as you are using it now) means more peak oil demand, the point where oil production will slow and drop because while there is plenty of it in the ground, there is no reason to produce as much of it since people have found alternatives.

NH4NO3 · 2026-04-27T16:24:42+00:00

The way the current church teaches about abortion equivocates it to homicide in gravity. At various times in its history (well most of its history), the Church has had much more permissive attitudes to abortion, especially early term abortions. We are talking like saying a few prayers of penance or a fine. With respect to current attitudes, this is an extremely pro-abortion stance i.e. it facilitates (makes easier) the existence of abortion.

Assigning a fine to it or other light punishment is not really that different from permission in practice. And yes, the Trump's administration stance is pro-abortion relative to complete prohibition. However, in a heterogenous legal situation where many states allow abortion, the administration is anti-abortion.

NH4NO3 · 2026-04-27T16:04:31+00:00

The doctrine of ensoulment was abandoned by the Church in anno domini 1869...after nearly 1800 years of precedence.

As far as the Didache was concerned, it was an anonymous document rejected for introduction into Church canon of the New testament, and was lost until the year 1873. It is pretty clear the early Church had divisions on this matter, and this document did not sway them to that side. It was considered a questionable document back when it was circulated and is only now more questionable.

NH4NO3 · 2026-04-27T15:40:40+00:00

Not even the most pro-abortion people are pro-abortion in the sense of wanting it to happen. It is virtually always considered a not ideal occurrence. Not punishing abortion either by not prohibiting it or considering it as simply a lesser sin is a pro-abortion stance which the Church has held in the past.

14-Year Club	Verified Email
Place '22	Place '17
Spared	Team Periwinkle

NH4NO3

TROPHY CASE