anonemouse

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• Commented on Unforeseen Consequences and that 1929 vibe
  So why was so much food imported, then?...
• Commented on Silence is ending (soon)
  Home Rule was coming - the shooting was more about who was going to run things afterwards Well, yes, in that the shooting was about getting a Republic instead....
• Commented on Silence is ending (soon)
  Government of Ireland Act, 1914. Easter Rising, 1916. Look up "promptly," Greg. And while you're in the P's, look up "postponed indefinitely" too....
• Commented on Unforeseen Consequences and that 1929 vibe
  It doesn't involve the PHYSICAL transfer of money, but it critically relies on the EXISTENCE of money What transfer of what is money in the modern incarnation could not be replaced by transfer of goods in a Neolithic one?...
• Commented on Unforeseen Consequences and that 1929 vibe
  Yeah, I wonder why England didn't have a famine in 1847. Can't possibly think of an explanation. Your smugness is disgusting....
• Commented on Unforeseen Consequences and that 1929 vibe
  But it's irrelevant for the purposes I was talking about, anyway. Trading information, yes, but information is simply NOT suitable for a trading token (a.k.a. proto-money). Hawala - which appears to have been in use in the Indian Ocean trade...
• Commented on Silence is ending (soon)
  Mate, if you drongos had put aside your absurd differences, made peace with everyone, got everyone on side and then gone to the Brits and said 'we're at peace, everyone is safe, we'd like to go now', they'd have packed...
• Commented on Unforeseen Consequences and that 1929 vibe
  Is the USA in that pre-revolutionary civil war period & is T Donald Rump Marius or Sulla? You're not the first to draw that analogy....
• Commented on Silence is ending (soon)
  One vote for "whatever plot you like as long as we get more Nyssian biology and DIY-scale terraforming, possibly with parrots if you want to" here. :)...
• Commented on Silence is ending (soon)
  I really want to set another story in Nysus Yes please. :)...
• Commented on Unforeseen Consequences and that 1929 vibe
  And there at least two combinations among the usual culprits who probably have the skills and resources to mount such attack It's not that hard....
• Commented on Crib Notes: Empire Games
  An example: check out food imports from Ireland to Great Britain during the Industrial Revolution, then remember the cottier class who paid their rent in farm labour to raise that food subsisted entirely on potatoes and buttermilk....
• Commented on Are VR esports going to become a thing?
  Or change a drudge on a treadmill into a harrowing escape through a zombie apocalypse... *cough*Zombies, Run!*cough*...
• Commented on Are VR esports going to become a thing?
  Definitely: there's a huge market for fitness and a huge market for video games, so there must be a decent overlap Wii Fit was the sixth most popular game on the Wii, so just maybe. :-P...
• Commented on Crib Notes: Empire Games
  Immediately after the Iraq war Iranian clerics issued fatwas that Islam favoured only two children, the government offered free vasectomies and tubal ligations, and birth control class attendance was made a requirement for marriage. Not all theocracies?...
• Commented on Burn The Programmer!
  2: What counts as "tested to destruction" or even "comprehensively tested" in software? There are so many more degrees of freedom than for a bridge truss. I'm not claiming designing and building for reliability in software is hard. I'm claiming...
• Commented on Burn The Programmer!
  1: "Really hard" != "can't". 2: What counts as "tested to destruction" or even "comprehensively tested" in software? There are so many more degrees of freedom than for a bridge truss....
• Commented on Burn The Programmer!
  I'm finding the role of religion in empires fascinating -- and not just Christianity. Every major pre-industrial empire save the Mongols had a single established religion (Rome, Persia, India, China, Byzantine, Ottoman, Spanish, British, ...), and I suspect trust and...
• Commented on Burn The Programmer!
  I don't know; you can put a sample bridge truss in a jig, test it to destruction, and be confident in the strength of others produced from the same design. It's really hard to do that with software....
• Commented on Burn The Programmer!
  *cough*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_Laws_(Ireland)*cough*...
• Commented on Burn The Programmer!
  It's definitely got more than just "computing/magic" going on - I seem to remember describing it as a portrait of the Californian Ideology once. I'm willing to admit multiple viewpoints on this. (Occult device to interpret world/piece of art can...
• Commented on Burn The Programmer!
  There's a reason the HEXEN tarot feels so appropriate....
• Commented on Crib Notes: Empire Games
  Interesting you cite steelworks. Arc furnaces work on an extremely short batch process, wouldn't they be perfect examples of industrial equipment to run when the wind blows?...
• Commented on Crib Notes: Empire Games
  It seems to me the biggest obstacle in "skipping coal" (or oil) is much the same as in getting off it: batteries. Renewables are intermittent, and therefore require either massive storage or massive excess generation capacity Why for the love...
• Commented on A bright and shiny hell
  It's not like you need to convince me that London ran its colonies entirely for its own benefit. And - like all of history - it's more complicated than we think. (Fractally, I suspect.) But when the popular narrative is...
• Commented on A bright and shiny hell
  Of course it's nuts to pin everything in the US on slavery (though Somerset v Stewart apparently did worry some). Some of it's down to Native/colonist relations: the Minutemen militias in New England were for going and doing war upon...
• Commented on Bread and Circuses (circumlunar version)
  that man made climate effects aren't going to be stopped, so we might as well get colonising the solar system instead. We can't manage a big biosphere with lots of redundancy and slack in the system, so we should move...
• Commented on A bright and shiny hell
  <snark>They get funding from the CIA, ISI, and Saudi Arabia to stop the godless Commies?</snark>...
• Commented on A bright and shiny hell
  I'm not sure how much help someone who takes a referendum about pregnant people's rights and jumps up and down on historic bigotry in exactly the way likely to convert what are currently soft yeses to noes will be to...
• Commented on A bright and shiny hell
  I believe the USAF is now seriously considering a replacement for the A-10 that's suitable for the sort of asymmetric warfare and fire support missions the A-10 is overkill for. Some of the contenders are modified crop-dusters. ...how many Spad...