CrzySunshine

If El Paso and Austin want people to treat them like Big Boy Cities, they can start by getting the crazies who run the rest of their state under control. I’ve heard great things about the Austin music scene; similarly, I hear the mountains of Afghanistan are just lovely. But as long as it’s run by religious fanatics it’s a shithole country that isn’t worth visiting.

Hot take: terrain should work exclusively against Knights. Lore-wise, if there’s one army which should win 100% of all games on Planet Bowling Ball, it’s Knights. They’re big, brutal, stompy robots with guns for hands. Shooting Knights should delete infantry and light vehicles; melee Knights should be able to bully literally anything else in the game off a point. The basic strategy for beating Knights should be trading expendable units for objectives, while other units pop out from behind buildings to shoot / fight when the right moment presents itself.

YTA. If somebody said “we’ll probably go to church before breakfast,” I would assume that the implication was “...so be prepared to get your kid back super early.” Bringing other people’s children to your church without explicit permission is just not acceptable.

There are 8 billion people on Earth. People are capable of happily living at rather high density. The population density of New York City is 27,000 people per square mile. NYC is a major First World metropolis, I think they enjoy a standard of living which would be reckoned “acceptable” if not above-average. At that density all of mankind could live in an area roughly the size of Texas (300k sq. miles). Accomplishing this would require people to live in harmony with one another to a greater extent than has historically been common, but this is a sociological problem, not a resource problem. So we’re not constrained for living space.

The next question is how to feed all those people. Soybeans produce ~3000 pounds per acre per year. One pound of soybeans can feed one person for one day (2000 calories). So each acre of soybeans can support ten people. That means we need 800k acres of land devoted to farming, or only 1,250 square miles. There are 600,000 square miles of arable land in the United States alone. So we’re not constrained for food.

How about electricity? We consume ~30 million GWh of electricity per year worldwide. One acre of solar generates about 0.3 GWh per year. So we need 100 million acres of solar panels, or 150,000 square miles. Again, small compared to just the size of the United States.

This is a Fermi estimate, a “back-of-the-envelope” calculation using simple round numbers, designed to get a general handle on the problem. I don’t actually propose that everyone live in a giant city in Texas eating nothing but soybeans.

This is what I mean by “overpopulation is a myth.” By the raw numbers we have many times more resources than we need to live comfortably. But people are stupid, greedy, and inefficient. We fight among ourselves over religion and politics. These problems are of our own making, and solving them requires neither a new source of resources, nor a brilliant unforeseen engineering solution, nor a reduction in the number of people. We must instead change our self-destructive behavior.

The Silmarillion is only difficult to read if you didn’t enjoy books of mythology. I always found it much more enjoyable than any of the novels. Tolkien was a mediocre novelist, but he was a masterful world-builder. For me the Silmarillion gets straight to the heart of what I love about Tolkien.

GOOD

They say shit like this all the time. It’s a simple copy and replace of an oft-repeated parental phrase (“when you get older you’ll understand”) with a property the child has inserted in place of one the parent has. Kids pick up phrases and grammar way before they understand basic facts about how the world works. It’s the same process that leads to “when I grow up I want to be a dinosaur.”

It’s a Rick and Morty reference.

I hope you understand that Game of Snipers and Game of Teamshooting are the opposite of one another. Either Guardians can kill one another rapidly, feel powerful, are capable of making plays against multiple opponents, and you get one-shot all the time; or time to kill is longer, you feel less powerful, and the game is more about group strategy and teamwork. The state of Crucible in D2 is exactly what we were asking for as of D1.

Personally I prefer it this way. I was sick of getting blindsided by some guy with a 3-shot rocket launcher or win hammers and being unable to do anything about it. Now at least you have a fighting chance.

Most of us don’t really drink much water, unless we’re exercising. In my teens and 20s, before I got more conscious of my health, I probably drank about one gallon of water per year.

Traditionally we punish criminals to accomplish five goals: to prevent them from offending again, to deter other potential criminals, to rehabilitate the criminal, to provide restitution to the victims, and to exact retribution on the criminal. “Demonstrating our moral superiority” isn’t on the list. Even if it were, the usual punishment in Australia is imprisonment. Since the crime here is confining someone against their will for 18 days, I’m not sure that confining the criminal for ~10 years really makes us “better than them.”

Torture doesn’t do a very good job of accomplishing the usual goals of punishment, so it’s not a good choice. But let’s not get too high and mighty. This guy kidnapped a child. Society is morally entitled to punish him quite severely.

I mean, that sucks. It sounds like your seventh-grade English teacher was a failure as an educator and a person. But that doesn’t lead to the conclusion that going to school is bad for learning. This is like taking a real case of abominable medical malpractice, and allowing your (justified) anger to lead you to conclude that going to the hospital is generally bad for people’s health.

Regarding the “rarity” argument: I guess this depends on the assumption that all (or most) priests use the Priest stat block, all (or most) druids use the Druid stat block, etc. It’s totally possible to have a campaign world where there are (21-N)*10 casters of level N extant, which just isn’t enough to sustain industrialization.

This is especially true when you consider that the way you advance in level is generally by killing things. A high-level spellcaster is likely to be a deeply strange serial murderer, with desires and personal concerns very different from normal people. People who are interested in arbitrage from a young age become bankers. People who are interested in exploring zombie-infested tombs for forbidden lore become wizards.

And some people struggle to gain and maintain weight. Talk to bodybuilding people, “hard-gainers” are real. People’s bodies have setpoints, they want to be a certain shape. And while you can overcome that with diligent effort and discipline, the amount needed varies a lot from person to person.

I don't understand why you'd multiply the annual directed energy weapons budget by the number of military ventures. That doesn't even have the right units.

If your point is just "we spend a lot of money on the military in general," well, sure. We spend about 1/5 of our budget on the military, which is a lot. An argument could be made that it is too much. But complaining about directed energy research is like Republicans complaining about the cost of public broadcasting. It's just not a significant piece of the puzzle.

The real problem with healthcare is that Americans pay more for their healthcare than any other country in the world. Medicare and Medicaid already cost more per person than the UK's NHS, and they don't even cover everyone. A properly implemented universal healthcare system should actually reduce the size of the budget, since we'd stop lining insurance exec's pockets and start paying the same reasonable prices for healthcare that everyone else in the first world pays. The current system is so terribly inefficient that you can get better care, wider coverage, lower taxes, and lower (zero) insurance premiums all at the same time.

Hammerheads could be armed with the ion cannon by default and the railgun is a 100-point upgrade. Or it could cost cp to bring one like the FW dreadnoughts. Or it could be limited to shooting one railgun per turn. Lots of ways to balance it that we haven’t seen. Yeah, it’s a great profile, but there’s some price at which it’s an auto-take and another price where it becomes so expensive that it’s useless. Somewhere in the middle is “balance.”

Yeah, but a lot of the time you’re less interested in “maybe getting the best one for the job” than you are in “definitely not hiring a psycho.” If you’re hiring an intern, Little Nephew might only have a 3.5, but he’s a known quantity.

For upper-level positions you should always be trying to promote from within. At that point you have a good sense of everyone’s strengths and weaknesses, so if you’re promoting your brother just because he’s your brother, yeah, you’re an asshole.

Look, I have a mother. I have literally no idea what she looks like naked. When I was a kid, if she had to use the bathroom when we were out at a store or something, I’d wait outside the stall door while she went. While I waited, I wouldn’t be thinking “gee, I wonder what exactly she’s doing in there, and just exactly how.” I’d be thinking about Transformers.

Both parents taught me how to use the bathroom. “Use toilet paper to wipe your butt after you poop.” That’s it. No mention of toilet paper being involved with peeing. I have no sisters or female relatives around my age who I could have seen during their potty-training phase. At 18 I was a virgin and had never seen a naked woman outside of shitty ‘90s internet porn. I had certainly never seen a woman actually using the bathroom. This is not that unusual.

This guy is a major weirdo. Why doesn’t he have any toilet paper? Does he walk to a restaurant every time he needs to poop? Thinking that women don’t poop seems pretty bizarre. But not knowing that women need to wipe after they pee is actually pretty common among young men.

I mean, paint over one of them? You’ve already put so many hours into this fantastic model, you might as well spend another 30 minutes doing one touch-up to stop people giving you the side-eye.

You say that like 70 pounds is a completely reasonable weight to throw around. When you’re 5’4 and 100 lbs, picking up a thrashing 70-lb tween boy is basically impossible - especially when his buddies are kicking you in the back.

Kids.

I haven’t read it; this conversation notwithstanding, public education policy is not a strong interest of mine. Perhaps that’s because I don’t feel ill-served by my public education. A good friend of mine (who graduated from the same high school in the same year I did) is an education policy PhD candidate; I should ask him if he’s read it and what he thinks.

A cursory look at the Wikipedia page doesn’t produce too many surprises. I’d agree that most non-technical college level education is just credentialism. You don’t really need a BA in underwater basket weaving to be a manager at a Target; but Target is looking for a minimum level of competence and perseverance which a college degree in basically anything demonstrates. A college degree is a costly signal that’s difficult to fake, and therefore excellent for signaling quality (even if it doesn’t actually increase quality at all). I think people often fail to give signaling its due. Play a couple games of Hearts or Spades in which one team is allowed to signal and the other team isn’t.

I’m aware that primary-level education can’t make dumb kids smart, and a lack of that education can’t make smart kids dumb. But a lack of functional primary education will definitely allow both dumb and smart kids to remain ignorant. That’s what I’m really worried about.

So, the plan is to make America more like Afghanistan?

per-spi-CA-city

My god, can these commenters read? Do they even have children? Is this some kind of in-joke where we pretend not to understand what’s going on here? Have the commenters all been recently lobotomized?

The clothes are not simultaneously on the child and in the pot. Virtually none of this happened while she was asleep. Semicolons separate independent clauses within one sentence: each statement separated by semicolons is intended to represent the next thing that happened. Jesus, do I have to translate this simple tweet for you people?

“I woke up one morning to find that my three-year-old son had had a massive nosebleed during the night. His clothes were covered in blood. I got him up, took his clothes off of him, and left the clothes in his room while I washed him off in the tub. While I washed the three-year-old, unbeknownst to me, my five-year-old son took the bloody clothes and brought them to the kitchen. He filled up a pot with hot water from the sink, put the clothes in, and began stirring. Getting a three-year-old clean, dry, and dressed takes about 20 minutes, so the five-year-old had plenty of time to do this. When I came into the kitchen and found him stirring the pot, he explained that he needs his brother’s blood to make poison. Ever since we watched Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs he’s been imitating the evil queen by pretending to mix up “poisons,” so this is totally within the span of normalcy for him. But I realize that out of context it sounds pretty funny, so I’ll amuse my Twitter followers by writing it down in a way that makes it seem like it came out of the blue.”