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<tormato> you guys should think of polls

and then make them

I've never had a conversation about this topic that wasn't interesting, so I thought it would be a good poll.  

space rome

I didn't even like the last few books in the original series. 

Trump is a ridiculous candidate, but I don't hate him yet. Going against Hillary makes him palatable in comparison. I don't think congress would work with him if we won, no matter what he wanted to do.

Why you're valuing steel at $7,000 ppu is the real question here. If I could buy nudes for 15k steel and sell them for $100 mil I would be a very rich man.

He seems like a religious fanatic of the violent variety. Nothing shocking or impossible to explain - how many times have we had incidents with homegrown terrorists in the past couple years alone? A guy has fundamentalist Islamic beliefs, he lives in a society that has opposing views, so he starts to hate that society. He looks up to the people in the Middle East who share his ideology and are fighting a holy war and dying for a cause he believes in, so he decides to do what they do.

The guy called up the authorities to pledge allegiance to an extremist group that's trying to create an Islamic Caliphate, he certainly thought he was doing it for Islam. I take his word for it. People who are trying to deny that this was motivated by religion are telling a story so unbelievable that I think it will backfire on whatever agenda they're trying to push.

It's not a cosmic coincidence that Party A and Party B are always getting almost exactly 50% of the vote each.

Each party desperately tries to win over as much of the population as possible, and they change to reflect the things that people like.

Because of this they're extremely similar, they do the same wrong shit over and over, they don't follow any clear or intelligent ideology, they're just broadly tolerable to as many demographics as they can appeal to. That's democracy for you.

If you always vote third party or never vote at all, the 2 main parties will not give a shit about you, your vote has no influence, you're just one of those X number of guys who always vote Green and have no affect on the outcome of the actual race.
But occasionally voting third party or failing to turn out can send a message. The main parties have to change and win their lost voters back.

But in the meantime, a general election is lost. Is slightly changing Party A for future elections worth giving Party B power for 4 or 8 years?

In general I think it's most productive to vote for the lesser of the 2 main evils. If lesser evils keep winning politicians have to become less evil. The only problem with democracy, I think, is identifying the lesser evil. When people think the most evil candidate is whichever one won't let transgenders into bathrooms, RIP effective democracy.

I've liked your polls so far.

I think any poll is good if it splits people between different answers, and if people actually care about the answer they choose and the number of votes other answers get.

Funny polls are usually bad because nobody really cares whether Wacky Nonsense A gets more votes than Silly Bullshit B. "What kind of bear is best" is a waste of a poll.

A meme tournament is a better idea because we'd have something invested in it, since it's a competition with winners and losers.

If you do personal survey polls, I'd stay away from ones asking about really boring information, like "What's your favorite kind of soda". If you do a survey make it something where other peoples' answers are actually interesting, like "Have you ever seen a ghost?"

Political/news polls can be good as long they ask a specific question that we're likely to disagree on. However people will avoid those polls to an extent because political discussion can start serious fights. Polls in the 'Thought provoking' category are probably better most of the time.

A category you didn't mention that makes good fodder for polls is entertainment. "Batman Vs. Superman, good, okay, or bad?", and so on. But you have to stick to very well known stuff that's been out for a while or else half the alliance won't be able to answer.

There are major cases where government intervention helps.

For example, fixing negative externalities, or acting on behalf of consumers who have imperfect information and can't hold everyone they deal with accountable. Because of the government you can't just dump your waste in the river and watch it float away, screwing everyone downstream to save yourself a small amount of effort. Because of the government you can't sell products that seem to work fine but kill people 20 years down the line from heavy metal poisoning, and so on. You can imagine free market solutions to those problems, but not ones that are likely to work in practice, I think.

Government interference is often a horrendous, wasteful, corrupt shitshow. Most people seem to think that everything that's ever made anybody sad should be solved by passing ten new laws about it, and every day the government turns into more of a bloated mess. But if you make me choose between that and total lawlessness, then I have to vote in favor of the lesser evil.

does the winner get exiled to BK?

Mafia postmortem:

Before game start: Piratemonkey is my partner, I message him trying to figure out what I can about this mysterious game setup. I only have a little mafia experience from a long time ago, so I don't have any clear strategy for this game.

Our job as mafia, basically, is for Piratemonkey to try to kill a power role every night, and for me to try to recruit a survivor every night. We need to figure out who is who on the survivor side quickly in order to win. If I guess wrong, I can die, and if we're too slow, we'll eventually be lynched or investigated.

Day 1: Alex emerged as town leader, town almost killed Patrick McFarlane, but decided not to. Probably hesitant because so little is known about the setup.

Night 1:

It's interesting that I guessed Natinator was likely a power role. I recruit Japan because he gave himself away, and Pirate kills one of Patrick's accusers to try to make Patrick look suspicious.

Day 2: Bear was forced to claim vigilante, and """NATO Russia""" got himself lynched. Patrick went on a rant about how the game is impossible to play with so little information.

Night 2:

I think Patrick is the survivoriest survivor that ever survived, a sure bet as a recruitment target, but the town continues to suspect him, and I don't want our new mafia member to be lynched. Instead I decide to recruit Natinator, going against my previous instinct. He's been inactive for 2 weeks, and my theory at this point is that people who are hanging in the game have an interesting power role, and people who are getting bored and leaving were just told "Survive."

IC looks like NATO France. I only hesitate because he seems too brazenly obvious about it, and NATO members ought to be extremely secretive to win this game. Piratemonkey is afraid it's a trap and decides to put off killing him until next round. For tonight we go after a hunch that Lord Darien is a shitty cop because he kept talking about getting proof before lynching.

I'm killed during the night because Natinator was NATO-nator.

Day 3: Inactivity gets bad around this point, no more mafia communication. Lordship is lynched for lurking.

Night 3: Piratemonkey kills IC, who turns out to be NATO France. Now there are 2 NATO members left, both known to mafia, with no roleblocker protecting them. Piratemonkey will win through nightkills if he survives 2 more days, or the mafia could tell the survivors the two people they need to lynch in order to win.

Day 4: The game grinds to a halt. Everyone is modkilled. Bear seems like he's figured out Japan is mafia. Hilariously Flavory has been in the game all along and just fucking SHOWS UP. LSU had told us there were 18 alive on day 1, but I had decided not to mention it.

If we ever have another game let's have it on Slack with really fast turns.

rest in pepperoni, LSU

I think this game was finished anyway. Right now for example there is:

1 NATO vigilante, Bear, who wins if he kills ISIS

An undisclosed number of ISIS members, who win if they kill Bear

And it seems like every other player in this game is simply a Survivor, who win if they're alive when the game ends.

It would have been in the interest of everybody except Bear to simply lynch Bear and win.

But who specifically would we hit, and how many reliable people do we have in range?

None of the micros look like they're worth hitting to me. The only attractive target I see on the entire alliance list is these guys: https://politicsandwar.com/alliance/id=2738

I've been tempted to buy every battlefield game but I've always ended up playing other stuff like Red Orchestra and Arma instead. Now they've finally sold me. I'm compelled to play anything set in WW1.

Both games take 15% of what you give them on average. Crap odds.

If they were extremely close to 50/50, like a roulette wheel, I might give them a go.

7 hours ago, Patrick MacFarlane said:

I have tried to have it explained to me what "RP" consists of but no one can give me a straight answer. 

What the heck does everyone mean by "Role Play "?

You pretend to be a big strong alliance like Black Knights.

I pretend to be a submissive little protectorate like Shuriken.

You walk in on my private government forums and see all my chatlogs exposed and leaking out. You get excited and your military rapidly expands to its limit. You tie me up in a web of treaties and open me up with a DoW. You tease me with a few airstrikes, and then pound me with ground attack after ground attack until all my resources spill out. I beg for a white peace, but you come back for round 2. You switch tactics and do a naval attack. "N-no", I cry out. "I trade from there!". You lean down and whisper into my ear: "Ayy lmao".

At some point the technology will be cheap enough and good enough that nobody will argue with it. That's inevitable.

But for the moment there are still many legal and technological hurdles. Getting something like that to work by itself 99.999% of the time instead of just 99% of the time is a serious challenge. For consumers it will come in slow boring stages, more and more autonomy creeping into every new generation of cars.

In-N-Out, a west coast burger franchise.

They make the best tasting hamburgers at fast food prices. What else could you ask for?

The nukes themselves don't cause a nuclear winter, the soot from the fires does, and it has to be from fires massive enough to lift those particles into the upper atmosphere where they wouldn't quickly fall back down. There's a lot of debate over whether or not there would actually be enough such fires.

I'm not saying the radiation would be harmless, but it would be survivable for those in the path of the fallout who took cover, and not every place would suffer heavy fallout. In the long term, there would be more cancer, but not so much that society would fall apart. For example, the atomic bomb survivors who took doses of hundreds of rads of radiation had 50% more cases of leukemia than normal and 10% more of other kinds of cancer. Most people worldwide wouldn't be exposed to nearly that much radiation at once, and slower doses are less harmful as well.

I've read a lot of interesting debate about whether or not nuclear war would really be as world-ending as it's portrayed to be. Apparently the fallout wouldn't make the entire planet deadly poisonous for a century, it could be sheltered from and most of what would be blown around would decay to very survivable level within weeks. And nuclear winter would only really kick in if the bombs caused a large number of concentrated firestorms that released massive amounts of smoke, which is just a hypothetical worst case scenario.

So many people in here are making it sound like the only books they've ever read are the ones they were forced to in high school...

I mainly like Sci-Fi, I'll second Japan77 and pick The Foundation Trilogy. Revelation Space also ranks pretty high on my list.

I also like fantasy but I haven't read enough to really pick a favorite. I know a few people here are fans of a series called the Swornbright Archons or something like that. I think the first book is called The Wave Kings, it might be worth checking out.

People on the pro side often frame it as purely a women's rights or an autonomy issue. But opponents of abortion are usually concerned with something much bigger. Imagine if fetuses were so developed after a couple months that you could talk them and they were going "Please don't let mommy abort me" - would you let abortion happen anyway because 'her body, her rules'? Or tell the baby that it's the product of rape, and we can't reasonably expect your mother to deal with that, so down the toilet you go? The real source of the disagreement is usually whether or not abortion is murdering a Person, which is unjustifiable, or discarding a clump of valueless cells, which anyone should be able to do on a whim, or something inbetween. Those on one extreme end who think a fetus is as valuable as an adult will never accept abortion, and those who think a fetus has no value at all will push against all restrictions.

So we have to decide what exactly makes a person a person. There's some special quality that you and I have that makes it a moral negative to cause harm to us, but something that nobody cares about like an ant has none of this special quality, whatever it is. Is it consciousness, awareness, intelligence, being biologically human, having a 'soul', or some mix of those? This is a philosophical question, there's no provable right or wrong, everyone has their own answer. But whatever that answer is, I think it must be a single consistent one. If you change your reasoning in every situation so that it matches your gut feeling, then you have no reasoning at all. So we can poke at each other's answers with thought experiments.

For example - if you don't think brain dead adults and babies with anencephaly have to be cared for, I think you should be willing to abort a fetus without brain activity.

And is the mere presence of brain activity enough? Is that the distinction that makes a fetus worth protecting? If so, should every organism with a working brain get similar protection?

And to go even further, suppose like most people you're not overly concerned with animal shelters euthanizing dogs nobody wants to care for, because dogs just aren't that smart. Then what's your opinion about humans that are dumber than dogs?

That's the road my reasoning goes down. The most defensible conclusion I've got is to say that life should be valued based on its position on some vague scale of consciousness and intelligence, as best as we can measure those things. Since I don't think babies in the womb fall anywhere on that scale that I'm remotely worried about, women can buy an abortion kit over the counter at 8.5 months for all I care. But if someone else stops at step 1 and says that any living human is sacred, or if they say that a 3rd trimester fetus in their opinion has enough mental development to deserve some rights, those can be reasoned and consistent positions too.

ITT post your best scores on the top 10 leaderboards.

Invited to this thread: Current or former leaderboard winners.

NOT INVITED!!!: Nations that have never tasted triumph

5 hours ago, japan77 said:

push to the mainland as quickly as possible....they probably could have gotten the US to surrender or risk having California's major cities blown to bits.

Send a task force three or four thousand miles to the U.S coast, and do what there? Try to bomb LA and fight against any number of land based aircraft that the U.S. cares to bring, and then sail thousands of miles back to Japanese water to resupply and repeat? Or by push to the mainland do you mean tie up vital divisions and unaffordable amounts of supply trying to invade Hawaii or something, sacrificing their real objectives in Asia?

I don't think the U.S. would have been dissuaded from war in any scenario. Consider Britain as an example - they were in far worse circumstances, there was a huge bombing campaign against them and so on, but it only made them more determined. We were the same way, the population and government was fully behind the war from the outset.

5 hours ago, Patrick MacFarlane said:

What if the Norwegian rebels hadn't taken out the heavy water plant in Norway from the Germans? We would see a nuclear Germany, no enemy but West across the pond.

It's conceivable that in your alternate history, the Germans might have eventually gotten past the pilot stage and started devoted massive amounts of resources to really producing a bomb, like we did with the Manhattan Project. But historically they were years behind us, heavy water or not.

5 hours ago, Patrick MacFarlane said:

but subtract the British and Australians in the Pacific and add the Soviet navy on the side of the Japanese. We are looking at a whole new game

That would be a problem in the early war but it just delays the inevitable. By 1945 we had a larger navy than the entire rest of the world combined and we weren't even finished ramping up production. You can argue that the U.S. might have been rushed before we had time to switch to a war economy and build up forces, but the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans make that extremely implausible. Don't underestimate the difficultly of stretching supply lines across thousands of miles of ocean, and especially of any kind of amphibious attack. Historically the U.S. did its amphibious invasions from nearby staging areas and with massive advantages on land, sea and air and they were still incredibly difficult. The way you gloss over the Germans "swiftly dealing with" the British is ridiculous enough - a German invasion of Britain some time in the early war is one of the most common alt history debates and usually the consensus is that's unlikely it could have succeeded under any circumstances. It would not be an easy thing for the Germans to ever do, especially after the U.S. entered the war on the British side.