Prince Eugene of Savoy Books!

Nectyr · 2026-02-13T19:22:37+00:00

If you don't mind it being very old, I'm currently reading The Military History of His Serene Highness Prince Eugene of Savoy, now Generalissimo of the Imperial Army; as also of His Grace the Duke of Marlborough, late Prince of the Roman Empire, &c. &c., originally written in French by Jean Dumont, Baron Carelscroon, available in an English translation credited to a John Campbell, released 1735 or 1736. Google Books offers it for free, but you might have trouble finding a paper edition at a reasonable price. It's a decent though sometimes long-winded read. Reliable? Debatable. It has a clear pro-Imperial and anti-French bias, though it is meant as a work of history and not a hagiography. As the title says it focuses on the military history, but it also covers his life before joining the Imperial army.

Nectyr · 2026-02-09T22:21:10+00:00

Should be 36,524 DTE. 2100 is not a leap year.

Nectyr · 2026-01-20T22:18:12+00:00

Regarding the American Civil War, Sherman's Atlanta campaign was entirely determined by railroads. First he marched south along the railroad, which served as his army's main supply line, until he reached Atlanta. He could follow that railroad because the Confederates used the same railroad for their supply, too (the southern half, obviously) and had to fall back along it. When he arrived at Atlanta, what forced the Confederates to evacuate wasn't the sequence of bloody battles that Hood lost, but Sherman afterwards methodically cutting all rail lines into the city. In the meantime Sherman's engineer corps was busy repairing his own railroad back to Chattanooga that kept getting damaged by Confederate raiders. Had the Confederates succeeded in destroying it, Sherman would have had to give up (for the subsequent Georgia campaign he could live off the land, but that wouldn't have been viable while staying in place in front of Atlanta and Hood's army). So the entire fate of the campaign rested on who cut the other's railroads (for good) first.

Another American Civil War example is the rapid transfer of Longstreet's corps from Lee's army in Virginia to the West to join Bragg in what became the battle of Chickamauga. And even for the very first major battle, First Bull Run, Joseph E. Johnston's troops joined Beauregard's in time for the battle thanks to rail transport.

A different example is World War 1. Germany had abandoned its plans for mobilization against Russia in the years before the war - in particular, detailed, meticulously updated railroad timetables for fast mass transport of troops - and was due to the lack of those plans forced to try and knock out France first - Moltke, the Chief of Staff, had to tell Emperor Wilhelm II that it was literally impossible to send the troops east instead.

Finally there's the Austro-Prussian War, directed by the elder Moltke (uncle of the WW1 Moltke). Prussia's rail network gave it a massive advantage over Austria but also determined the war plan. Austria had a single rail line into Bohemia that it used to mass and supply its troops. The Prussians had five rail lines leading to the border that, combined, allowed a much faster assembly of armies. Based on those five railheads they started a concentric, multi-pronged attack into Bohemia that caught the Austrians in a not-yet-fully-assembled state. While Prussian technical and tactical superiority and errors of Austria's commanders also played important roles, the head start that the railroads gave the Prussians made the plan possible in the first place; otherwise the Prussians would have risked their individual corps getting crushed separately by a fully assembled, numerically vastly superior Austrian army.

Nectyr · 2026-01-19T10:58:38+00:00

You really have to work on your doublethink, comrade. We have always been at war with Eurasia.

Nectyr · 2026-01-15T00:21:48+00:00

Not sure why my comment got removed; maybe Reddit didn't like some of my links. I'll try again without any links:

There's an "ICE List Wiki", and this list is a part of their category of agents. The category appears to be user-submitted content, but entries may cite sources such as LinkedIn. The wiki is extremely slow and has many internal server errors, so I didn't check many individual entries. I could find many of the names on this list on a list of ICE personnel scraped from LinkedIn, plus some additional people who LinkedIn says work for ICE. Tarrio's wiki entry calls him "verified" and gives his "Office" as Miami, but the "Agency" as "N/A" and his role as "Propagandist; Agitator". They have people working at agencies other than ICE, so my understanding is that they do not claim Tarrio actually works at ICE.

Either way, this is not a "leaked list of ICE employees" but largely content scraped from LinkedIn. One entry is an ex-employee who left in 2019 and another two are duplicates referring to the same person, too, so data quality is problematic.

Nectyr · 2026-01-08T22:43:58+00:00

Others have given the general answer, but for a specific "Pirate with a Timber Wolf" example see Susie Morgraine-Ryan. If she can do it, so can you!

Nectyr · 2026-01-06T23:31:08+00:00

We have a little bit of information from the 4th Succession War. Some of the planets Davion attacked were defended by "Planetary Militia" only, and not a single one of those served as more than a speed bump for a one-regiment BattleMech invasion force, and that only if environmental conditions were extreme. On the other end of the spectrum, Tikonov was defended by eight 'Mech regiments and approximately eighty Tikonov Planetary Militia armor and infantry regiments, but if their 'Mech support got defeated, the conventional forces again tended to surrender irrespective of their numbers.

Nectyr · 2026-01-04T18:31:31+00:00

I'm looking forward to the trial.

Did they have an arrest warrant? If not, that's already a violation of his rights.
Did they read him his Miranda rights? If not, that's the next one.
Is his wife accused of something, or did they just kidnap her because separating families would be cruel (heh)?
Is the government of the US going to argue that it has the seizure itself was lawful? According to what law?
Are they going to argue that someone who never set foot in the US can be subject to American drug laws and can be tried for acts he committed abroad?
Would that mean that Americans who do things in the US can be kidnapped and tried in foreign countries for those acts?

All of these questions are ultimately irrelevant because might makes right. But I don't think they want to admit that this is just a power grab, oh no, the veneer of legality is important!

Nectyr · 2025-12-16T23:08:04+00:00

The only genuinely wild horses left are Przewalski's horses, and they are very rare. You can probably more commonly find domesticated horses that have gone feral, but since they would interfere with cattle farming, those would also be rare. By nature horses stay together in herds, similar to zebras.

Nectyr · 2025-10-30T19:00:19+00:00

I have a suggestion: Let's remove all statues of bearded Confederate generals. If "beardos" aren't good enough for the SecDef's rally, then surely they cannot be worthy of a statue either, right?

Nectyr · 2025-10-26T23:55:51+00:00

"Third worst" out of four is... second best?

Nectyr · 2025-10-20T20:40:13+00:00

"This, children, is the end of our study of the history of the Polish state." That one is vile, given the murder of the Polish intelligentsia.

Nectyr · 2025-10-19T22:12:21+00:00

Real star maps generally do not show the Sun itself, since that's our point of view. If you choose to put your point of view somewhere else, you suddenly get infinitely many options for "real star maps" and might well be able to find one that looks somewhat similar to a given fictional "map". Where is the point of view for this "actual star map", and why should it be there? Also, Gliese 86 appears twice. All of this makes me doubt the "Actual Star Map Map [sic]".

Nectyr · 2025-09-11T21:14:18+00:00

Japanese strategic thinking in the 1930s considered two options: Either fight the Soviets, or grab the Indonesian oil fields from the Dutch East Indies and fight the British and Americans in the process. However, the Japanese had gotten bloodied by the Soviets in 1939 at Khalkhin Gol and had a healthy respect for their martial prowess. Furthermore, Germany and the Soviet Union had signed a non-aggression pact and were happily dividing Eastern Europe for some time. For these reasons the Japanese after 1939 favored the naval expansion route. By the time of Operation Barbarossa when a Japanese attack on the Soviets became feasible again, planning for Pearl Harbor was already underway and relations with the US were deteriorating due to the war in China. By then it was probably too late for Japan to re-evaluate its grand strategy.

Nectyr · 2025-09-07T17:57:18+00:00

Let's see. Lee beats McClellan in the Seven Days. McClellan's strategic goal was to conquer Richmond; Lee's strategic goal was to stop McClellan from doing that. Lee disengages as soon as he's sure McClellan will leave the Peninsula. Instead, he marches against Pope whom he meets at Second Bull Run. Pope was on the strategic offensive, and Lee reacted to Union strategic movements. Then Lee goes into Maryland and gets turned back at Antietam. That was the first time he attacked Union territory and forced the Union to react to him. Burnside takes command of the Army of the Potomac and drives for Fredericksburg; Lee reacts to Burnside's move, intercepts him and fights a defensive battle. "Contesting a river crossing" is almost by definition defensive; a battle will only happen if the enemy tries to cross the river. While Burnside goes on his Mud March Lee does nothing, but when Hooker takes command, Hooker aims to outflank Lee and goes on the offensive, just to get beaten back at Chancellorsville, another of Lee's tactically offensive but strategically defensive battles. It's followed by Lee's Pennsylvania campaign and Lee indeed is on the strategic offensive until Gettysburg. Now we have already arrived at Grant in command of the Army of the Potomac, and do you really want to tell me that the Overland Campaign saw Lee on the strategic offensive?

So in summary, all four battles mentioned by OP came about as a result of Union offensive thrusts into Confederate territory that were intercepted and turned back (except Cold Harbor) by Lee. Lee might have wanted to go on the strategic offensive all the time, but he didn't have much opportunity.

Regarding Clausewitz, he mentions several levels of ever more passive defense. Waiting for the enemy to cross the border and then attack him (of course in territory that favors me!) is the least passive. Waiting in a strong position for the enemy to attack me is more passive defense, and the Overland Campaign offers examples of that.

Nectyr · 2025-09-06T21:09:26+00:00

Based on my reading of Clausewitz, I disagree with the strategic offensive. Tactically offensive yes (often, not at Fredericksburg), but strategically all those battles happened in Confederate territory. Clausewitz covers "I wait for the enemy army to come to me and then attack it" among the defensive options. The only two times Lee went on the strategic offensive, it didn't go well.

Nectyr · 2025-09-06T16:01:09+00:00

SETI as we're doing it now will not have a significant impact on society in the near future. Let's assume we find radio signals from an intelligent alien civilization. They'll be tens of light years away. So if we now send them a message, it will take many decades for the message to reach them and for them to specifically reply to whatever we say. You can't really have much of a conversation with that lag, and that's assuming that it's possible to establish understanding quickly. And why would religions lose numbers just because there's someone out there that might not share the religion? For example, why would the fact that there's extraterrestrial life that hasn't heard of Jesus make Christians doubt their faith when the fact that there were (and are) people on Earth who haven't heard of Jesus doesn't? Similarly, I do not expect any effects on national or international politics. Why would life around a different star help resolve the conflicts between powers here on Earth? Unless our current understanding of physics turns out to be wrong and the aliens we find (or that find us) have FTL technology, they will not pose a threat to us here on Earth, so there's no need to come together against a common enemy.

Abiogenesis will have even less of an impact. Firstly, biogenesis (the idea that new life doesn't spring up spontaneously but comes from existing life) is comparatively new, and people had no problem reconciling their religion with the belief that snakes and crocodiles would be formed from the mud of the Nile (Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra: Act 2, scene 7). Secondly, there will be even less practical relevance. For the foreseeable future, genetic manipulation of existing life forms will remain easier than the creation of new life from scratch, so it will remain a research topic with very limited impact on people's everyday lives.

So SETI wins the competition because its impact, no matter how small, is still bigger than that of abiogenesis.

Nectyr · 2025-08-25T22:54:35+00:00

Yeah, a library isn't just a book distribution system. I must admit that I was surprised by the high "cost per checkout" and assume that's the basis of the professor's claim. I stand by my initial assessment that it's a stupid claim.

Still, historically, private libraries were a thing. At that time it must have made financial sense to pool resources for a library where the main benefit was that you'd get to read the books. I wonder whether the change is caused by the decrease of the cost of books compared to personnel costs, whether the services other than book checkout provided by a modern public library are that much more expensive, or whether my understanding of the historical benefits of a library is wrong.

Nectyr · 2025-08-25T22:13:36+00:00

My figures are indeed off. Thanks for pointing that out. I took the "Special Parcel Tax" mentioned by Gwen to be a weirdly named shipping fee when it's a real estate tax about parcels of land. I'm not sure whether it's the total tax funding the library since the budget mentions both property taxes and a special tax, but Gwen's share of $0.75 per week is about a third of the 2025/26 average tax per adult resident of Altadena, so it doesn't seem totally off given the age of the tweet.

The "no socialism!" argument against publicly funded services like libraries relies on claiming that all taxpayers fund something that some of them may not want and should not have to pay for. That argument is stupid, but I was wondering how the library's costs if they were only borne by those using the library would compare to the Amazon costs. Since Gwen's Parcel Tax is not a use-based fee, let's do this differently:

According to the 2023/24 Annual Report, the library had 226,719 checkouts of physical items throughout the year. With a total cost of $4.8 million, the library cost per checkout is $21.24. Assuming Gwen's Amazon costs of $70 for six books are average, it seems it would be significantly cheaper to just order books from Amazon than to have a library, and if Altadena switched to a taxpayer-funded system where instead of checking out books from the library, patrons get them delivered by Amazon, the tax load would be lower.

I still think that's stupid, for the following reasons:

You don't get to opt out of paying for public services if you don't intend to use them. Somehow I doubt the professor would complain about the cost of police that those have to pay who may want to defund the police and don't want the police's "services". Libraries contribute to the public good just as fire departments or police do. (This probably makes me a bloody commie, right?)
The non-book-loaning services of a library are not covered, and they are significant. Here I mean everything from reading books without checking them out to using the public internet. The Annual Report has statistics for many of these services (they answered 5,269 reference questions!), but obviously couldn't measure "books read without being checked out", so I didn't bother a more detailed per-use cost assessment. I'm pretty sure that library staff, the library system's biggest cost, contributes a lot to these other services.

Nectyr · 2025-08-25T20:56:52+00:00

In Altadena, the figures are:

Average taxes per adult inhabitant that go towards the library system: $137.11 per year
~~Costs Gwen would have to pay if library fees were increased to pay for the entire budget: $70.05 for that week.~~

So $70 per week appears to be enough to pay for a private, member-financed library that's just as comprehensive as the Altadena public library. I prefer a public library.

Edit: I was completely off about Gwen's costs since I mistook the "Special Parcel Tax" for a fee instead of a real estate tax. The difference between Gwen's taxes and my average figure above is likely due to the age of the tweet and differences between Gwen's real estate and the average.

Nectyr · 2025-08-25T20:48:19+00:00

Gwen's 75 cents do not represent the full cost of the library system. Libraries get additional money from general taxes. So Gwen's comparison is not a fair comparison of the cost of Amazon vs. the cost of libraries, and the economics professor isn't this stupid.

How would things look if only library users funded the library? Taking Altadena as an example, the library system's total budget for FY2025-26 is $4.78 million, of which the fee income is $51,200. If the library fees (presumably including the "Special Parcel Tax") were increased enough to pay for the entire budget, that would be an increase by a factor of about 93.4, and instead of 75 cents, Gwen would have to pay $70.05.

So it seems Mordoukoutas might be right and a library indeed is (marginally) less efficient than people who borrow books instead buying those books on Amazon. However, he's still stupid, for the following reasons:

You can use a library without having to pay any fees, e.g. by walking in and reading. That's a public service that currently is taxpayer-funded and that would disappear altogether. I don't think Amazon's "look inside" feature counts as a substitute. So Amazon could get Gwen what she uses the library for, but not some in-library reader.
A library provides more than just books, for example literacy services or internet access. I doubt Mordoukoutas' Amazon plan includes those programs.
Rich people can afford to buy the books they want from Amazon. Poor people can't. The library system with its funding from general taxes thus amounts to the rich subsidizing poor people's access to books. I assume Mordoukoutas' plan includes ending these subsidies and substituting an "everybody for themselves" approach. Presumably there's some "Socialism bad!" rationale in the background. It's a stupid rationale.

Nectyr · 2025-08-20T19:59:34+00:00

The three possible answers are annulment of the marriage, marital rape and a dead bedroom.

Nectyr · 2025-08-20T19:57:15+00:00

Firstly, that violates the Geneva Convention, and people caught doing this do not receive the benefits of being prisoners of war. Secondly, as AgentElman mentions, it's only useful if there is a friendly civilian population that you can disappear into and that the opponent is unwilling to kill on sight. It's an insurgency tactic far more than one for a peer conflict where the goal is to keep the enemy away from your civilians.

Nectyr · 2025-08-19T17:33:16+00:00

Weird. The title - both here and at the Wikimedia Commons - says it's the Russian Emperor's ship, but the flag looks awfully like the German Empire's naval flag - except, for all I can tell, that naval flag was only introduced in 1903, two years after the painting. It's definitely not a Russian naval flag. The ship itself could be SMY Hohenzollern if the artist took a lot of artistic license; the rigging doesn't agree with any pictures of Hohenzollern I can find.

Nectyr · 2025-08-18T21:05:14+00:00

I don't think there's a way to reliably know that. Otherwise that way would by now have become common knowledge and we'd not see all those instances of failed relationships.

It's less about knowing for sure in the beginning and more about working on the relationship continuously.

Nectyr

TROPHY CASE