TheChurn

American hegemony was a conscious American policy choice. We didn’t want the Euros having an independent foreign policy, we wanted them reliant on American military protection. This was how the US kept those bits of its empire in line.

Notice how the only Western European country that even pays lip service to independent action is France, the one Western European country with a military capable of independent operation. And then we get “Freedom Fries” and all that shit whenever they don’t do whatever the current US admin wants.

The single biggest thing Trump fucked up for the US was pushing NATO countries to spend more on defence. This will drastically reduce US influence over the continent in the coming decades, speeding up America’s worsening diplomatic isolation.

Therapy might help with the childhood trauma but it imparts the poverty trauma.

Which one is better depends on the build you’re going for and whether you want to recruit all companions and get the true ending or are fine with the neutral.

There are really only 3 search providers, Google, Bing, and Yandex.

All others will pay one of these three to use their indexes, since creating and maintaining that index is incredibly expensive.

Electoral college. Idaho always goes red, Oregon always go blue. Moving population from Oregon to Idaho transfers electoral votes from a blue state to a red state.

Whether it matters or not depends on whether it changes the tipping point state in any given election, which is hard to know in advance, but for the red team it is at worst identical to the current setup and at best a small boost to their chances in a presidential election. Conversely for the blue team it can either be meaningless or a slight negative.

if it didn’t have parents it isn’t food either

What does this mean?

Because cheating the progression could affect the monetization.

If I blitz through the game and unlock everything with cheats, I’m much less likely to stick around and spend on the premium armor and battle passes. The point of the daily orders and slow progression is to make the game a habit, which increases the likelihood that someone will spend by increasing the number of chances they have to do so.

Well ‘we’ aren’t actually in a recession. Economic growth in the US has been positive the last several quarters.

That would give politicians another reason to raise the retirement age, in order to stay in power.

I’m not sure I’d trust modern CA to do Med3 justice. The new style of Total War is just a different beast from the sublime RTW/Med2 era.

Lots of little things changed, and it just ‘hits different’. Probably the biggest difference is just that every single fight after the first 20 turns will be a 20 stack vs a 20 stack, and every single battle is life or death for that army. It makes the campaign much faster paced - declare war, wipe stack, capture cities for 3 turns until the AI magics up another 20 stack.

In the original Med2, since there wasn’t automatic replenishment, there were often battles between smaller stacks, even in late game, as they were sent from the backline to reinforce the large armies on the front. Led to some of my greatest memories trying to keep some random crossbowmen and cavalry alive against some ambushing enemy infantry they wandered into. The need for manual reinforcement led to natural pauses in wars and gave the losing side a chance to regroup without relying on the insane AI bonuses of the modern TW games - and I do mean insane; they’ll have multiple full stacks supplied from a single settlement.

Early heat seekers wouldn’t reliably lock an aircraft from the front, since the heat signature is really only visible from the rear.

Something like this would almost certainly need to be actively guided, but then the RWR needs to be more expensive and that cuts into yacht money for the Lockheed execs.

There’s no real complexity. Computers are first and foremost electric space heaters, a negligible amount of energy is used to perform computation.

If you would be heating a room with resistive electric heating, a computer drawing the same wattage can do the same job while also, in theory, doing some useful work.

If you are just evaluating heating options, heat pumps use less energy to output the same heat.

They send random gifts some times, usually a code to redeem something in a game I don’t play.

Some super reacts - animated emojis basically.

Other than that I really couldn’t tell you. I don’t think the subscription is worth what the subscription gives, but the alternative is the free product gets worse faster, and that would disrupt a lot of communities that I enjoy interacting with.

Thinking of Discord as a whole, I think it is worth the nitro price. Not in love with the trajectory though.

I mostly just pay for it because I’ve used it for ages and definitely get more value out of it than the subscription cost. I don’t think I use a single nitro feature.

enough men exhibit predatory behaviour to the extent that a decently large percentage of women fear the average man more than the average bear.

Women should fear the average man far more than the average bear because they will almost certainly never encounter the average bear, but will encounter thousands of men.

That said, the entire argument belies a deep misunderstanding of statistics. Many women, perhaps most women, have experienced trauma at the hands of men. Many men, perhaps most men, have not been perpetrators of that trauma. There is not a 1-1 relationship between victimized women and guilty men - there is a minority of men who negatively affect many women.

The entire thing has become flamebait and it is impossible to have an actual discussion about it. The point is to start a conversation about how women feel unsafe in society - not to talk about bear attacks and incels.

how else can it be interpreted?

As a call for representation in Parliament, the body levying taxes.

The slogan wasn’t “No taxation unless we are an independent political entity”.

“No taxation without representation” is also a drastically misunderstood line.

What they were effectively asking for was self-governance, being removed from parliamentary control.

Given the technological limitations of the time, there was no way to effect a representative scheme in parliament with a constituency that was a 12-week round trip away. Furthermore, there were serious discussions of adding seats to parliament for the colonies, and the colonies refused to send anyone.

The Assembly of Massachusetts Bay was the first which ever took exception to the right of Parliament to impose Duties or Taxes on the Colonies, whilst they had no representatives in the House of Commons. This they did in a letter to their Agent in the summer of 1764 … And in this letter they recommend to him a pamphlet, wrote by one of their members, in which there are proposals for admitting representatives from the Colonies to fit in the House of Commons … an American representation is thrown out as an expedient which might obviate the objections to Taxes upon the Colonies, yet … it was renounced … by the Assembly of the Colony which first proposed it, as utterly impracticable.

And

Whilst [the radical colonists] exclaim against Parliament for taxing them when they are not represented, they candidly declare they will not have representatives [in Parliament] lest they should be taxed … The truth … is that they are determined to get rid of the jurisdiction of Parliament … and they therefore refuse to send members to that assembly lest they should preclude themselves of [the] plea [that Parliament’s] legislative acts … are done without their consent; which, it must be confessed, holds equally good against all laws, as against taxes … The colony advocates … tell us, that by refusing to accept our offer of representatives they … mean to avoid giving Parliament a pretence for taxing them

They rebelled against the empire because they wanted lower taxes. The freedom from tyranny narrative was concocted to get buy in from the lower classes who had to actually die for the revolution to succeed.

The rehtoric never matched reality - “All men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights”… except all those slaves and Indians.

People have honestly no idea about the early history of the US.

The pilgrims literally left England because they couldn’t oppress people enough. They can to America to build their perfect religious society.

Many colonies in the South weren’t ‘fleeing’ anything, they were fully funded by the crown with the goal of settling the land and sending resources and taxes back to Britain.

Got the second years ago when it launched because I was looking for a new rpg to play. Bounced off it immediately because the gameplay was far too passive – I didn’t feel like I was doing anything – and the fucking quote spam POPPY WILL PROTECT MASTERPON is branded on my soul.

This would’ve been more believable if they left off the wheat. Oil I can imagine, but no fucking way are US troops stealing wheat of all things.

Do they think there is a mill at their base? What the fuck would they use it for? It has negative value.