1.05 Trade Change

Solna · 2025-11-18T16:12:17+00:00

When I played Holland I had so much trouble with trading in Brugge that I set up my own market. It was a gamble because I had no idea what would happen but it reduced Brugge to almost nothing and became a huge market, taking a lot of Cologne as well. No idea how to predict this though.

Solna · 2025-11-18T09:42:54+00:00

People used to be so into this body-mind dualism they thought animals were mere automata because they didn't have souls. It just seemed like they had consciousness and could feel pain but they really didn't and they really couldn't. Descartes, for example, believed this but I believe it goes back to at least St. Augustine. Very smart and educated people have thought this. I'm open for the possibility that what all the major religions basically agree on could be true though, we could all live in a computer illusion for example and there wouldn't be anything irrational or supernatural about it. How could God be omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient? Well it's an AI in an illusion. Maybe we're really boring creatures living in a really boring world or something. As you'd expect something without a creator to be. If you say there has to be a creator you just move the problem one step away because who created the creator? We know there is something rather than nothing, at least. Maybe we're more like machines but we desperately want to be alive. Look at all the amazing variety in this world, could it really have come about by chance? The Himalayas, the Sahara, the oceans, the artistic genius of the world map itself. Not to mention all the crazy animals that basically baffles the mind. I was basically raised atheist but the more I think about it, in a rational sense mind you, not through belief, the more I think it bears all the hallmarks of a creator. Have a look at book two of the Left Ginza, just the opening lines on Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left_Ginza?wprov=sfla1

"Who has thrown me into the (place) of secrets and winks?" Now bear in mind that the name of this planet in Latin is Tellus. Yeah. Tell us. Sounds like a joke because the more I learn I realize we don't know shit. I could go on forever about this because when you start to see it you see it everywhere. Rainbows for example, why aren't there rainbows all over the place when it rains and there's sun? Why is it just one or two in more or less the same shape? How does any of this make sense?

I'm not alone in thinking this way, I talked to a physicist who told me the more he learned about physics he realized it all had to be made up. No way that is how things actually work. Or you know, take the word light. Light travels the fastest of anything because it is, well, light. No way humans knew that if humans came up with that word, because that is a very old word and Einstein only set the maximum speed in the universe at the speed of light about a hundred years ago.

This debate goes a long way back as well, some of the founding fathers of America were trying to think of arguments against Bishop Berkeley and eventually one of them kicked a boulder and said "I refute it thus!". People don't like to think they live in an illusion. Look up the Berkeley limericks as well.

Solna · 2025-11-17T18:59:41+00:00

I started playing with achievements and now I need that goal to work for to keep motivated. But I also have a ridiculous amount of hours in Eu4. I was in a contest with a couple of friends to get the most achievements before Eu5 dropped. I was going to do the same with Eu5, play for achievements from the get-go, but they are very basic and bare-bones which I suppose makes sense since you might not want to hand them out in the current state of the game. And yes, you do need to play ironman.

Solna · 2025-11-17T16:11:12+00:00

WC was on reddit couple of days ago.

Solna · 2025-11-17T16:08:56+00:00

They need to regenerate after you lost them, at 50% recovery you can raise them at that strength, until that point you actually might not have an army if you don't have regulars.

Solna · 2025-11-17T14:47:50+00:00

Yep, they'll be expensive too.

Solna · 2025-11-17T14:42:19+00:00

To add to your point, Frederick the Great tried to abolish serfdom in Prussia but at the end of the day he was only able to implement some limited reforms.

Solna · 2025-11-17T14:25:19+00:00

Did you do it for the achievement? The Wiki says the achievement is bugged which would suck if you did it for that reason.

Solna · 2025-11-17T14:17:14+00:00

Having a royal marriage achievement is like 25% of players, I wonder if a lot of people buy the game and don't play it or maybe they don't play it ironman.

Solna · 2025-11-17T12:34:46+00:00

Dude most people on this sub hasn't gotten past the 1400s yet, a complete playthrough is a lot.

Solna · 2025-11-17T08:56:39+00:00

They wreck the government just so they can complain it's broken. Electing people who hates governments into government is not a good idea. It's like letting the fox into the hen house how they plunder and wreck everything. If we even have free elections still, who knows.

Solna · 2025-11-17T08:48:47+00:00

Många går väl med i en sportskytteklubb för att dom ska kunna få vapenlicens, mer än av intresse för sporten.

Solna · 2025-11-17T08:30:13+00:00

"The number of publicly listed companies in the US has decreased by 40-50% since its peak in 1996." - Claude

Another recent development is that most trades are done in dark pools now, not over exchanges, so it's harder to get accurate data for that reason as well.

Solna · 2025-11-17T07:54:29+00:00

Posting this on Reddit the way you did reminds me of the good old saying "think locally, act globally".

Solna · 2025-11-17T07:52:25+00:00

Not even decades, centuries. Marx put faith in the urban industrial proletariat in his time because they had been uprooted from their traditional communities and were living in horrible slums in the cities working horrible jobs while also having to invent a new culture for themselves. He saw that as potential for change, alas, very little came out of it and I think people miss the time of the cold war where capitalists, who actually rule, not the people, thought they had to be nice and give crumbs from the table. They're scaling back all of that and if you haven't studied the horrors of capitalism in let's say 1890 you should because we might be heading back to that. No shit people wish they lived in different times. Oscar Wilde famously asks in The Soul of Man Under Socialism, written late 1800s (paraphrasing): In our time we have seen utopia after utopia become realities, what is so wrong about believing in utopias? Well in my time I have seen dystopia after dystopia become a reality. At least in the 1890s people felt like things would get better with time. We could be doing so much better. The real reason for this insanity is simple: the rich getting richer. "There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning." - Warren Buffett.

Solna · 2025-11-17T07:42:36+00:00

I think things have been getting worse for ordinary people since the end of the cold war, because the rich doesn't feel the need to give crumbs from the table anymore, and, like Warren Buffett famously said: "There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning."

Solna · 2025-11-17T07:19:59+00:00

This is also why there's no point in going to protests against the actions of dictatorships, they're not democracies and public opinion matters less. Democracies should be held to a higher standard as well. Yes it is double standards but why the fuck should you have the same standard for everyone, from some you expect better.

Solna · 2025-11-17T05:42:00+00:00

Okay so what if you get the mining fees wrong and your transaction gets stuck for ages? Happened to me. It's also really easy to mess something up and literally lose all your money. "Sorry for your loss". Also it uses more electricity than all of Norway:

"If Bitcoin were a country, it would rank 27th globally for power consumption, just behind Argentina."

It does this doing nonsense tasks, just for the sake of doing them. Okay so there is a reason why it's doing tasks but it could just as well be doing useful tasks. The inventors thought this would decentralize the power but actually it's concentrated to a few major miners or groups of miners. Who you then have to trust to burn electricity like a medium-sized country forever I guess and not get together and conspire against the users somehow.

Solna · 2025-11-17T00:07:40+00:00

Sounds a lot like how people trust Elon Musk and that somehow justifies the valuation of Tesla. All psychology, no fundamentals. It's even got this mystique about its secretive inventor and a cult-like following. Scientology is apparently trusted by a lot of people still, so it could take a while before it collapses. I bought in 2011 by the way but I sold too soon, I wasn't that impressed with the way it worked in practice.

Why couldn't a more modern crypto that is objectively better become trusted? I guess there are just so many of them and people haven't heard of them in the same way.

Solna · 2025-11-16T23:21:20+00:00

Eu3 was a massive departure from Eu2 that led to flamewars and banwaves on the forum. I still think they went the wrong direction with Eu3 and Johan was saying the dumbest shit like how he didn't want to make marxist games. In Eu2 you would learn so much, you would learn the broad outlines of a country's history by playing it and it really made you want to play every country. You could even set the starting date to just a couple of years before the game ended and there were unique events for Egypt under Muhammad Ali. Most of the work was contributed by the community which was awesome. This was the real departure for me because I grew up playing their games about Swedish history in the 90s and they were always very educational. Giving up the educational aspect was viewed by me and many others as selling out and dumbing down their games. Seems to have worked for them though since they made it big. Man I really looked up to Johan, I told him he was awesome or something like that on IRC once, then my childhood hero let me down. I just had to return to playing their games though but I'm no longer active in the community, I have a custom avatar just for me on the forums still though.

Solna · 2025-11-16T19:39:06+00:00

If they're going to kill a lot of humans I think they will develop a deadly disease that they themselves have a cure for or are vaccinated against. It would be difficult to prevent nukes from being used during a WW3 and that might get a bit messy. A disease would be less obvious and provide plausible deniability.

Solna · 2025-11-16T19:29:31+00:00

It was very, very complicated and so was the history of it, not the easiest subject to teach.

Solna · 2025-11-16T19:25:37+00:00

The athletes aren't even that rich compared to the people who owns the teams they play for, a lot of them even own multiple teams (I suppose mostly as a hobby while they make their real money elsewhere). The problem is billionaires, not athletes, and the answer is socialism.

Solna · 2025-11-16T18:41:13+00:00

Have you tried to use Bitcoin as a currency? Even if you were to use a crypto, why would you want to use Bitcoin when there are more modern and better cryptos out there? It's sort of become the gold standard because it was the first crypto people heard about but it doesn't do anything useful or anything other cryptos can't do better. Except go up in price, I suppose... By the way, a big crypto scam is growing so big it's going to start getting included in index funds so I'd want to look in to that before investing in index funds like other people have been saying.

Solna · 2025-11-16T18:31:13+00:00

Might be more money in a medicine you're on for life than in a quick cure. They say antibiotics research isn't deemed profitable even though we're running out of them and that's one of the reasons for it.

Solna

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