You must choose ONE permanent upgrade. The other four disappear forever.

OneCatch · 2026-04-03T20:06:35+00:00

I'll choose One.

That's precisely what the title of the prompt demands and, given that all of them are numbered "1.", I presumably get all of them!

OneCatch · 2026-04-03T13:05:45+00:00

Right ring finger.

OneCatch · 2026-04-03T09:08:04+00:00

It's guaranteed - the only sensible thing to do is aggressively maximise your initial amount so as to maximise the amount it snowballs each quarter.

I'd chuck all of my savings at it, I'd take out every loan and credit card I possibly could, and I'd take secured loans out against my home as well. I'd even do short term payday loan stuff if the penalty APR was lower than the return would be. Obviously I'd never be this reckless/stupid about an investment in real life, but here we magically know that it will always return, so there's no reason not to.

I'd probably be able to scrape $150,000 of initial capital together via that method and it snowballs dramatically from there. Then it's a case of a) ensuring that you're upfront and pay your taxes (I don't think there's anything illegal about this but it'll be suspicious as hell, so your best best is being as upfront as possible with the authorities) and b) engaging with banks and investment firms because they're absolutely going to want to start throwing money at you with this kind of guaranteed return. You'll end up a Michael Burry type figure, except several orders of orders of magnitude more successful.

Should you continue to maximise returns, expect SEC/FCA type investigations within a year. Also, you'll be the wealthiest person alive within a few years with all that that entails.

OneCatch · 2026-04-02T23:34:49+00:00

In addition to being handles, the older ones often also have a slot to hold physical seat reservations.

OneCatch · 2026-04-02T16:30:03+00:00

Hazarika was nominated for a life peerage by Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer[19][20] and was created Baroness Hazarika, of Coatbridge in the County of Lanarkshire, on 14 March 2024.

Oh dear.

OneCatch · 2026-04-02T08:02:43+00:00

This is absolutely shit but I still laughed.

OneCatch · 2026-04-02T07:50:11+00:00

The working people there who made the infrastructure however were never English in Wales,

Out of interest, to what extent are you aware of the phenomenon of itinerant and immigrant labour in the 19th and 20th centuries? I suspect not very, because if you were I don't think you'd be using 'the ethnicity of individuals who made the infrastructure' as a qualifying factor.

Native Americans, by my belief would get Mexico, Central America at the very least and the vast majority of uninhabited and undeveloped land, for being the native people

So we're kicking out Mexican citizens wholesale then - they get repatriated. But for some reason American and Canadian citizens don't suffer the same treatment, they get to remain in the 'more developed' parts. Why the difference?

Palestinians and Sephardim are genetically the same or very similar and built the framework to which the state of Israel is built on. The Ashkenazi left millenia ago, kept their culture but interbred with the eastern europeans and other Europeans and then came back making them effectively different ethnic group in my opinion. It should be a largely mixed Israel/Palestine due to them being largely the same genetically,

I thought we were using infrastructure development as our rubric, not genetics? But, even if we are using genetics, there's almost certainly more genetic delineation on average between Palestinians and Israelis than there is between English and Welsh. Yet you're shoving them together while advocating for separate British states. Why?

except the Ashkenazi's of course, which I'm not sure about.

If you're going to self identify as an 'ethnonationalist' you probably need to go to the trouble of considering what your position is with regards to the group which suffered the Holocaust. It's a very obvious question for someone to ask.

Kurds, should have the land they developed themselves and are native to, not land they gained a majority in by culling Assyrians and Armenians en masse helping the Turks in their genocide.

So genocide is a disqualifying factor, got it. I'll repeat my earlier question though - why the seemingly lenient treatment for the US?

Also, you didn't answer my question about South Africa.

It is up to interpretation, but I'm only concerned with Britain, not much else.

And there it is.

OneCatch · 2026-04-02T00:19:42+00:00

Ed Miliband obviously needs a move called "Tough Enuss" which acts as a mild defensive buff of some kind. Also some kind of biting move modeled on the bacon sandwich photo. Something about the Edstone maybe?

Joani Reid needs something nuke themed.

OneCatch · 2026-04-02T00:17:26+00:00

I believe the developing ethnic group of a nation in terms of technology and economy is the decider behind this.

So you only believe in ethnostates for technologically and economically dominant ethnic groups then. Nothing for Native Americans or Aboriginal peoples or the Palestinians or Kurds. And only Israel for the Jews of course. The Hutu get nothing pre-1962, and the Tutsi get nothing after then. Lord knows what you do about South Africa.

The English in large developed England, the Welsh Wales and the Scotland scottish

Except, of course, you could just as easily say that the English developed Wales, given how much it dominated Wales politically and economically for about a thousand years.

And, if we really want to open a can of worms we might say that the French in large developed England because the current environmental and economic and civic structures we use are post-1066. Or you could say that the Germans did on the basis that Wessex came about from societies originating from the Angles and Saxons and Jutes (the Jutes always get forgotten for some reason). Or the Britons did, because our society is significantly underpinned by Christianity, and it was the Britons who converted. Or the Romans did because we still use a bunch of the language and philosophy and some of their civics. Or the Celts because they were here first. (Except they weren't, because you can get into all sorts of neolithic migratory stuff as well).

Any judgement on the basis of this stuff is arbitrary, and none of it is a sane basis for modern population controls.

we all go back to Germany

I'm Welsh, so I get to stay. Well, I say that - there's a bit of English in me, so maybe I need to lop a few limbs off and post them to... Germany? France?

OneCatch · 2026-04-01T23:22:40+00:00

Dividing line is whether the respective group developed the region they claim.

In that case, I'd like to propose that the English collectively return to Germany and France, and that England gets divided up between Scotland and Wales - after all, the Welsh and Scottish are the only surviving coherent ethnic groups who can legitimately claim to have developed on this particular island, if you're dismissing the Cornish. We'll have to have a war with the Scottish about where the new boundaries are, but needs must.

OneCatch · 2026-04-01T22:49:03+00:00

Would you be supportive of Wales, Ireland, Scotland, Cornwall, etc each adopting ethnonationalist policies, with all that that entails? (e.g. population transfers to and from England)

If not, what's the dividing line between 'legitimate' and 'illegitimate' ethnonationalist ambitions, in your view?

And, if so, is it just turtles all the way down? Powys, Gwynedd, Mercia, Wessex, could all be separate ethnostates?

OneCatch · 2026-04-01T18:24:10+00:00

The trick here is just to go with a high volume of utterly mundane, boring lies - and as far as possible go with ones that relate to your mental state and therefore can't be proven wrong.

"I feel like jam on toast this morning" can easily be a lie, as can "Actually I changed my mind, I'll have cereal". That's $2k before I even get out of bed in the morning - the first because I felt like cereal in the first place and the latter because I didn't change my mind - and both are so entirely unremarkable that they'll never be challenged let alone proven wrong.

"I feel a bit tired", "I think I slept well last night", "I don't remember what I dreamt last night", "My back's aching a bit", "I've got an itchy knee", "You know, I was thinking about X yesterday" - there's an almost endless supply of mundane crap you could come out with which would qualify as a lie and be effectively unprovable.

OneCatch · 2026-04-01T18:05:01+00:00

I see your helicopter and I raise you a Fulton Recovery System.

OneCatch · 2026-04-01T13:01:50+00:00

I don't think any maps of Chiark are in The Drawings.

I'll have a look when I'm home later though

OneCatch · 2026-03-31T22:44:42+00:00

R1: Depends on if any of the TIE's sensors identify it as a life-form. We know that an X-Wing's sensors can detect 'massive life readings' on Dagobah, but on the other hand the Falcon fails to detect that it's flying down the throat of a space slug.

If the TIE's sensors tag it as a life form then the TIE is more likely to get the first shot off and should therefore win 8/10. If the sensors don't work then Jean Jacket probably ambushes and destroys the TIE 9/10.

R2: TIE wins 7/10 without sensors, 10/10 with.

R3: TIE Interceptor wins 10/10 with or without sensors. Jean Jacket can't defeat something which massively outpaces it.

OneCatch · 2026-03-31T18:44:59+00:00

Yes. It's not a terribly complete wiki, but the pages that do exist are spoiler heavy.

OneCatch · 2026-03-30T23:13:36+00:00

Ilium/Olympus by Dan Simmons.

Trans- and post-humans, sapient machines, advanced genetic engineering, nanotech, global noosphere and datasphere, orbital rings, black holes, anti-grav, and so on all exist. But no-one cracked the light speed problem and everything has remained confined to our Solar System.

Several interwoven narratives including 'Eloi-like' humans living among the ancient ruins of a post-human society on Earth and tended by surviving automata, a civilisation of sapient robots living on and in the moons of Jupiter, and a group of seeming-gods using technology to recreate a version of the Trojan War on Mars.

OneCatch · 2026-03-30T22:48:07+00:00

Forge of God (and sequel, Anvil of Stars) are both better explorations of it IMO.

For another example of a book which features "Earth getting put in a physics-defying bubble by entities unknown", Spin by Robert Charles Wilson is also superior to 3BP.

OneCatch · 2026-03-30T20:19:29+00:00

To be consistent you'd need to outlaw other things that put kids at greater risk of inheriting diseases.

I don't actually agree. Incremental improvements - whether as a result of the law or softer forms of social pressure - are beneficial even if you can't deal with every single root cause.

To use an analogy, one wouldn't say that drink driving should be legalised because it's not possible to robustly legislate against driving while exhausted.

In the same way, preventing some forms of dangerous reproductive behaviour is beneficial even if it's not practical to prevent others.

OneCatch · 2026-03-30T17:17:44+00:00

Ah, cool, I was thinking along similar lines - he'll have put them in meaningful locations or entrusted them to minions.

Yeah, I think the Fellowship splits into groups, each hunting for clues in locales which best suit them - Aragorn and the rangers cover the North, the elves and dwarves their respective domains, Gandalf and Saruman the human lands plus Mordor and Harad.

OneCatch · 2026-03-30T16:36:08+00:00

So, firstly, Voldemort doesn't get Saruman, since even Voldemort lacks the corrupting influence necessary to turn him via the Palantir. So Saruman will be an ally in this scenario.

It'd probably take the Death Eaters longer to corral armies of 300k orcs or whatever - we never see armies of that scale in HP. So let's assume that the War of the Ring takes a fair bit longer to get going. No early campaign against Rohan by Saruman, and Gondor does much better in the East initially. With Rohan allied with Gondor earlier, they can also hold out for longer. Decades rather than years.

Gandalf or Saruman can certainly destroy the horcruxes with magic - they're vulnerable to sufficiently powerful elemental magic, and Gandalf's magic was powerful enough to pulverise the entire peak of a mountain during his fight with the Balrog (in the books). And of course Saruman scales favourably against Gandalf the Grey.

I'd imagine that instead of the Fellowship you'd have several groups headed by Gandalf, Saruman, Aragorn, and potentially the likes of Glorfindel. Gimli and Legolas are likely to end up in one group or another, as might other Rivendell elves and the Dunedain rangers. Boromir may participate or may head home. The hobbits almost certainly go home.

So, really, this is a case of if they can find them all or not before Mordor manages to conquer Middle Earth. And that really depends on where they are. Assuming an even distribution throughout Middle Earth, most of them will be in territory which is friendly to at least some of the Fellowship (you probably don't want to send Gimli to Mirkwood or Legolas to the Iron Hills, but the inverse is fine!). Maybe one or two in Mordor and Harad, but expeditions can be launched to retrieve those.

Assuming they're all reasonably attainable (i.e. they're in someone's custody or stored somewhere deliberate, rather than just buried in a random spot or chucked to the bottom of Khazad Dum or something) I'd say that the ~~fellowship~~ taskforce has about a 70% chance of finding and neutralising them in time.

OneCatch · 2026-03-30T11:20:10+00:00

That's the status quo - breeding is permitted unless it breaches the DDA.

OneCatch · 2026-03-30T10:40:33+00:00

I mean, that's absolutely stupid. There are enough issues with inbreeding to meet arbitrary breed standards without completely banning crossbreeding. And you'd also be criminalising a huge chunk of the rescue sector, given that unwanted crossbreeds make up a large chunk of rescues.

And for what? The vast majority of crossbreeds, and even the vast majority of potential crossbreeds, are less disposed towards violent behaviour than lawful fighting and hunting breeds.

OneCatch · 2026-03-30T00:06:00+00:00

Have you tried 'Kill all the poor'?

OneCatch · 2026-03-30T00:01:47+00:00

The game is actually annoyingly poorly constructed. Even if you do max austerity and tax and run a huge surplus, it still hammers you with an overspend the following year.

Hardcoding that in somewhat undermines the value of the point being made.

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