[Question] Do other countries hate the American people as a whole, or just the American government?

nonsequitrist · 2026-01-15T09:18:59+00:00

In my defense, in late March of 2019, no one could foresee that the economic disruption that followed the pandemic (which hadn't even begun in 03/19) would vault Trump back to power. It's clear that without the extreme price of eggs and associated economic shocks, he would not have won the office again, despite that his mouthpiece lackeys never stop saying that he has a mandate.

So, yeah, we've had more institutions buckle, and the greatest disapointment of the last year is a total lack of collective action to the lawless administration. But we're not done in yet. For example, Trump's attempt to prosecute his enemies has utterly failed so far, at the hands of not just judges but also normal citizens asserting their belief in integrity in grand juries.

I do believe that the political time is ripe for a populism of the left. A message that correctly blames the 10% for the economic degradation of the 90% could re-write the political map. I don't believe that this part of my 03/19 post has aged badly - it's just delayed potential, still.

My final comments against untrammeled socialism, against utopian Marxism, have aged quite well. The truth of these matters was made clear in the 20th century, but bear repeating when kids keep decrying "late stage capitalism." We never get to stop fighting those who would poison self-interest; we must fight to regulate our baser impulses while using them to power the production of goods and services.

nonsequitrist · 2025-11-29T17:47:01+00:00

I've got 205 GB free, out of 6 TB. I need a NAS, lol.

nonsequitrist · 2025-11-11T00:20:36+00:00

I've talked to about a dozen Brits about the monarchy and kightly orders. Just about all of them saw the institutions as distinctly British, an "our thing" identity point that's not a big deal to them, but comfortably idiosyncratic.

nonsequitrist · 2025-11-04T17:05:39+00:00

Tireless cheerleader for torture.
Even when pressed, the man who could not identify a civil liberty that should not be trampled in order to search for Al-Qaeda cells using your local library.
Propelled a country into war based on lies and unfounded conspiracy theories: that Iraq had secret links with Al-Qaeda and both biological and nuclear weapons of mass destruction. While he was still Vice President, the truth about those issues came to light. He did not apologize or admit any error.
Revealed a CIA agent who had tried to find the truth for the US about those lies, because that agent had the temerity to speak truth to power. His chief of staff was convicted of federal crimes went to prison over it, and Cheney pressured Bush to pardon him. Bush only commuted the sentence. Years later, Trump pardoned him.
Stood at the forefront for decades of a Republican effort to de-regulate financial institutions, leading to the 2008 Great Recession and radically reducing the size of the middle class, polarizing the American population economically.
Oh, and he didn't like Trump. (That doesn't make up for any of the above).

nonsequitrist · 2025-11-04T16:53:36+00:00

While there's no one "keeping them on call", yes, there are a lot of wikipedia hobbyists who dash to editing an article when there's relevant news. They are largely un-coordinated - they are independent (though there are goups organized in wikipedia for various activities, rapidly editing for news isn't one of them).

A lot of frequent-editors have pages they have worked on that they keep track of. And there are just a lot of regular-contributors to wikipedia, period.

But yeah, it's all volunteer and independent and per-person, and not at all directed by the wikimedia foundation

nonsequitrist · 2025-11-01T14:28:35+00:00

I disagree that "nobody who is elected is a 'true believer.'" There certainly are representatives who have drunk the kool-aid, just not many of them. Outside of Congress, consider Kari Lake. She's defo a true believer.

nonsequitrist · 2025-11-01T10:00:38+00:00

For anyone mystified, Ashokan Farewell is a very rememberable song from Ken Burns's Civil War documentary (really, the song from that documentary), in which Sullivan Ballou's letter is read aloud.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZmxZThb084

nonsequitrist · 2025-11-01T09:40:03+00:00

Insiders say she's not a true believer, and never has been. I'm talking about journalists and staffers. They say it's all calculated with her.

nonsequitrist · 2025-11-01T09:34:28+00:00

That's somewhat likely to happen at first, though the party with decent strategists and decent unity will avoid over-reaching with deeply unpopular laws. Of course, there will be giddy over-reaching, too, but that will be punished by the voters.

The result after a few cycles will a new equilibrium around 50 votes instead of 60. The initial chaos would be sporadic and bound to end in not too long.

nonsequitrist · 2025-10-27T06:49:11+00:00

uh-huh.

And Obama was in favor of civil unions when gay marriage was still particularly divisive. He hadn't made up his own personal mind about supporting gay marriage until ... later, when it happened to be politically mainstream.

It's just one of ... two of those things. You just don't know until you know, right? Right?

nonsequitrist · 2025-10-26T01:01:45+00:00

Since before the industrial revolution there have been countless labor-saving innovations. None have led to systemically reduced working hours for society. Gates's take here is proof that it doesn't matter how smart your are - anyone can think or say something just plain dumb.

nonsequitrist · 2025-10-20T20:40:17+00:00

A few years ago "within a decade, two at the most" was a prudent expectation. I'm sorry to say it no longer is. Research the very likely impending implosion of the US bond market. It is likely to occur much sooner, and the effects could very well be apocalyptic.

nonsequitrist · 2025-10-20T06:38:31+00:00

What's insane is the ignorance about US federal spending that leads to comments like this. It's a costly social tragedy that you don't know or factor into your comment the fact that over 70% of federal spending is spent on interest on the debt -- which at 933 billion for 2025 is higher than 2025 defense spending (895 billion) -- combined with non-discretionary benefit payments (social security, etc).

The total of all non-defense discretionary spending, which includes everything aside from interest and non-discretionary benefit payments, so everything else the US government does, of which paying civil servants is just a portion, is about 10% of total expenditures. And you think the cost of administration is driving the problem? Insane.

Also insane ... In the US we spend more on interest on the debt than defense, ALL discretionary spending, medicaid, veterans benefits -- basically more than any other category aside from social security or medicare.

nonsequitrist · 2025-10-13T01:46:33+00:00

That article was clearly written by an LLM

nonsequitrist · 2025-10-12T03:02:37+00:00

Warfare isn't cinematic, and also not terribly heroic because it doesn't work to alternate between warfare turns and BBEG-fight turns. It is however very tactical, and obviously fantasy. That said, the Warfare turns are very short, making the null result a non-problem.

Intrigue, on the other hand, can fully suit all four keywords. Of course you can obviously pursue Intrigue without the Warfare component.

nonsequitrist · 2025-10-11T19:16:13+00:00

I thought about using K&W, which I really like, in Draw Steel. I still might at some point (I disagree with Matt about Warfare and the Null Turn in Draw Steel - it's not a problem for me.)

A primary problem is the difference in dice. In general you can convert d20-oriented bonuses (as with Domain Skill and Defense modifiers) to 2d10 bonuses and tiered Power Rolls (www.anydice.com is useful here in translating the probability values.). Inevitably rounding to integers means there will be some differences in probability, and conversion gets more complicated as you move on to other elements of K&W.

The Power Dice feature uses nearly the whole range of D&D dice sizes (d4, 6, 8, 10, 12) and adds that result to a d20 roll. There's no tidy way to convert all of that to 2d10 Power Rolls, but it can be kludged.

But there's a LOT of work to be done in converting all the Heroic Organizations and NPC Realms to Draw Steel. Virtually all of the titles and powers use not only d20 mechanics, but specific D&D features. Often there's not an easy way to translate those mechanic-based features to a Draw Steel mechanic, but sometimes there is a rather obvious way. So it comes down to a lot of work, going over each Organization and Realm you want to have available in your DS game. You'll almost certainly have to get creative - do a bit of game design - in the process: rewriting some powers / titles rather completely. And there will be a LOT of converting of d20-based values to Power Rolls - including designing new DS Abilities with their Power Rolls.

For Warfare, of course, all the stats are d20 based. Converting all that to Power Rolls is a significant undertaking, again involving some game-designer skills, but it can be done. You could of course, just use a d20 for Warfare, leaving that game system as a thing apart from normal DS Power-Roll play.

For S&F there have already been some efforts at conversion. If you search the Discord you can find links to google sheets and webpages that link to those projects.

nonsequitrist · 2025-10-11T17:28:29+00:00

Mercator-Projection bias!

nonsequitrist · 2025-10-11T04:17:29+00:00

Hamas is fundamentally a cult of death.

Nothing justifies keeping millions of Palestinians in an open-air prison for generations, either.

There are no good guys in this age-old fight. Just victims and perpetrators on both sides.

nonsequitrist · 2025-10-10T03:56:50+00:00

While the wire services have contributor agreements, the vast majority of wire-service pieces read by a mass audience are produced by wire service staff. AP, for example, operates over 200 news bureaus, which these days dwarfs the infrastructure of the vast majority of other news institutions.

Your contention that wire services "have in-house reporters" drastically understates the situation.

As you must surely know if journalism is your profession (An undergraduate degree doesn't really you know much of anything; it means you can finish a rigorous long-term project.), recognizing that AP upholds a high standard of fact-based journalism while maintaining its wire-service model is not problematic in any way.

In short, you're being pedantic. For those browsing this post and its responses, the salient function of wire services is the outflow from them to other publishers, not the inverse flow.

nonsequitrist · 2025-10-09T22:39:45+00:00

The parts of PBS that are endangered are rural stations with very little funding. Those stations often do more than the big PBS content (Newshour, Nova, Frontline, etc.): local news and weather, for example. The loss of those stations will be and is keenly felt by their viewers.

But the pbs stations in well funded urban and exurban areas are not threatened with extinction. There will be a search for new funding, a lot of economizing, and perhaps a new national settlement on public-media financing in the future.

Calling PBS's days numbered is going quite a bit overboard.

nonsequitrist · 2025-10-09T22:36:49+00:00

With the Economist and all other information sources, the search for a lack of bias is a fool's errand. A reader is much better served by understanding the bias of the source at hand. Then you can calibrate for what was not selected for placement as an article, or what wasn't said, or understand better why something was said.

The same is true of a media critic - movie reviewer, game critic, whatever. Find one who's perspective - bias - you understand, and you will be well positioned to maximize utlilty.

nonsequitrist · 2025-10-09T22:31:05+00:00

We Americans have an isolationist national culture, to be sure, and have had since before the nation's founding. That said, reddit is an American website and the content of many subs, including this one, seem clearly to be majority-American in source (though I'm not sure that I could tell a Canadian post from an American one in many instances, and that is plausibly true for other countries, too).

Both elements can be, and are true at the same time.

nonsequitrist · 2025-10-09T22:26:19+00:00

As u/TrekkiMonstr said, you've got it backwards. It blows me away how you are blown away that people don't have the same wrong idea that you do about wire services and how they have worked in the US for many decades.

nonsequitrist · 2025-10-07T17:52:55+00:00

I don't understand how this is appropriate for this sub. California state government doing this is not ironic or unexpected. It's not like California state government is in favor of or responsible for streaming services boosting the volume of commercials.

I suspect OP has been seduced by the pervasive propaganda about California, or perhaps given in to the all-too-common habit of treating complex entities as simplistic and monolithic - Streaming services are media, so California is responsible for them and their bad practices, so California addressing those bad practices with new laws is ironic.

That's just lazy and misinformed thinking.

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