Bay 12 Games Forum

Yo', hold up. I'm pretty sure any number of bugs and bacteria have us out spread and out massed. Any other species isn't quite accurate. Notably macroscopic, maybe a bit closer. Accomplished is a different story, but that's somewhat arguable until we actually get the hell off this planet. Until then (and our eggs out of the single basket) a bacteria strain or insect species or whatev' has equal odds of outlasting anything we build or manage to discover. Probes and stuff are a good start, though.

... also pretty sure there's been some form of other!primate or another, maybe some other crap, that have managed the whole norm propagation thing. Last I checked it looks a fair bit like we're more quantitatively than qualitatively advantaged on that front. Which seems to be a pretty persistent pattern, honestly. We say humans are uniquely (capable of) X, and then it turns out not-us Y actually gives a decent go at it, if perhaps not as effectively.

Just made me wonder why are we magically exempt from equal punishment?

I don't think we are, exactly. It's less magic and more pointy sticks and posses. Presumably an animal that could kill your chickens and keep you from killing it would be able to defend its poultrycidal habits as it pleases. Ninja'd a bit, but eh.

Unfortunately for the things what eat chickens, there's not really anything non-human on this planet we've failed to figure out how to consistenyl kill when it starts eating the chickens we've claimed as livestock/pets/hunting stock/etc. Meanwhile humans have this nasty habit of eventually figuring out how to akido a nine mil into your eye socket if you keep offing their cousins, so we have a lighter touch when it's people doing the chicken killing.

... though that said, I'm pretty sure there's been folks murdered over chicken hustling without subsequent censure social and otherwise. Killing humans for killing your chickens is conditionally fine, basically. Some animals are probably in roughly the same situation these days, actually... just mostly because we've about xenocide'd whatever poor bastard of a species they are.

... trump to go to the middle east, vatican. With a message of religious unity, of all things. One of the areas he managed to alienate (even if they still voted for him) some goddamn conservative american evangelists with his attitude towards the subject.

Yeah, we're fucked. Them, too. Pretty sure I've seen militant anti-theists with more piety and respect towards religion and religious mores than trump has, or at least better able to fake it. Let's hope the article and puffery coming from the administration is exaggerating about him intending to pursue that track. And by exaggerating I mean lying out their ass, and the secret service or something ready and willing to physically muzzle trump the second he starts speaking about it. Otherwise holy shit, this administration may have found the one thing we haven't overtly done to straight up piss off the middle east and non-US christian/catholic nations.

... well, no, not exactly.

When you're not briefed fully on subjects as potentially serious as the one in question seems to be, you don't open your mouth. Like, full stop, you shut the hell up until you're entirely sure you're in the clear because both the immediate consequences and possible knock-on ones can very easily be measured in lives in both the short and long term. You don't exactly get a by when it comes to information of this sort, particularly when you're disclosing to an adversarial foreign politician, for running your mouth because you didn't have full detail beforehand.

Though with a bit of thought, I'm not entirely sure if you're calling for the giving of doubt, here. What you're mentioning may actually be worse than most current framing of the issue, some sort of doubling down anti-doubt thing. "They can't have murdered Mr. Green, they were busy with committing a rape/homicide two houses over!" Can't quite figure out if a person that doesn't read important shit before talking about it is actually better than one that does and indulges in potentially murderous information disclosure anyway. Like, at least with the latter you have some degree of assurance the person understands the magnitude of an issue even if they don't particularly give a shit about it...

That's a pretty poor description of Enlightenment era techniques. Madison in particular did a ridiculous amount of historic study on what had been done previous to the United States.

Which meant roughly piss all, if you're talking optimal governmental organization or quantifiable danger

Can't say we're doing much better now, to a fair extent (due in no small part just because of simple inertia and whatnot), but the tools, methodology, and data, necessary to actually have a go at making an optimal governmental system that isn't functionally half snake oil and a quarter alcohol, just didn't exist prior to a handful of decades ago, and are only starting to become something vaguely worth a damn in recent-ish years to boot. Intensive study of bad/nonexistent data, with relatively sub-par methodology and basically no tools worth mention isn't particularly meaningful, y'know?

Not to disparage the folks' efforts, exactly, but there's a reason working in the sort of conditions with a similar suite of techniques and tools is not what you'd call a prospect being salivated over by folks working in similar fields and on similar issues, nowadays. Some things that were built off some of it as a foundation or earlier starting point or whatev' is more of a thing, but most of that kind of junk in present usage just... doesn't really look much like what they came from, save maybe in a shared terminology or rough outline sort of way.

It was good for its time and in other ways, but its time was also shit and we're talking optimal organization, not academic or ideological rigor or whatever. Madison was physically incapable of studying and observing the sort of information needed for that sort of project (to no small part because it didn't exist and functionally could not be acquired with the infrastructure, technology, and methodology of the time) to be anything but functionally guesswork, and what he did have to work with was at best limited and at worst outright grossly misleading (and that to an extent even beyond what modern efforts have to deal with, which is a hell of a thing).

They tried their damnedest and managed a fair amount that held up to one extent or another, in one sense or another, but so did geocentrists and humorists. Respect is due, but it doesn't mean you shouldn't throw most everything they did out the window or call their stuff good in anything but a sort of relative sense contextual to their time. When you're talking optimal for the enlightenment era, you're more talking least suboptimal for the time in question, heh. Not entirely sure we can manage too terribly much better yet, to be fair, but still. Ratification era might as well have happened on another planet for the extent it's relevant to proposing the question in question today, or analyzing where/if things have substantially cocked up as opposed to being your average snafu. Growth might have broken a confederacy, but the US has long been more some kind of mutant bastard of one that doesn't much look or act anything like 'em.

If it's became more non-optimal because of growth et al, I'd probably wager the effect was notably smaller than, say, the invention of the telephone or car, or some few dozen other things. Constitutional system's changed with the times a fair bit. It's likely less optimal than it was earlier,* but optimality's never really been a working measure of living means of societal organization. It's mostly been doing alright, with some hiccups here and there, as methods of government goes.

*To the extent it was optimal at all to begin with, considering the originators might as well have been lobotomized blind rats so far as straight up physical capability to manage that particular measure goes, to say nothing about all the other ways they weren't nearly well equipped for such an endeavor. Trying to talk optimal in regards to a period when fucking statistics functionally didn't exist, never mind all the other shit that just wasn't getting and couldn't get any attention, is something of an exercise in futility. Whole thing's been about idealism more than efficiency, by a very, very long shot, heh.

Make multiple levels, like a big stadium or concert hall.

Nah, pack the bloody buggers into the one we have, clown car style. If some of them don't make it out of the compacted katamari cube of politicians, well, ent of freedom thirsts for blood or something.

Not... not really perfectly reasonable. The intel in question is something we apparently hadn't even shared with our allies, shared with a representative from a country we're largely at odds with in the general region and subject, that could potentially put people in rather lethal degrees of danger. Giving a rather strong indication the U.S. can no longer be trusted with information of that nature, and that working with them has become significantly riskier for potential agents and allies. Dude probably ratfucked US cooperation in intelligence operations pretty hard with the disclosure in question, more or less.

Oh, not true, not true. I'm sure there's someone out there you could trick into paying an inflated amount up front for your kickstarter or whatev' access, regardless as to if you can or will actually give it to them. Could also use ranting about it as a hook for some sort of video or article type series, net equivalent amount of dosh as investment through ads and donations. Probably other stuff, too! The world of recouping financial loss is wide and varied.

Though, ah. I'm not entire sure how cromulent linking to NH is on B12's forums. The thing's standalone, as you note, and distributed as just the whole game already patched, and is possibly somewhat illegal, copyright wise. Poke about suggests that genesis might be going freeware in the near-ish future, but so far as I'm aware it's still commercial and other than something possibly unintentional from the main site (apparently you can download a demo and then patch it with an official patch and that'll remove the copyright protection), there's not been official indication the thing's welcome to be flapping free in the wild.

... that said, yeah, it adds a fair amount to the already pretty nice (if perhaps a bit samey after a bit) Eador: G. Bit unstable, though, from what I remember. Not enough to notice immediately, but enough to make actually getting through the whole of some of the later (i.e. larger) maps an occasional crap shoot. Which is rough, considering it's not terribly likely to start being an issue until you're a fair bit into a map (which is to say, you just ran an hour or three of play into a bug wall). Still. Pretty sizable expansion/improvement if you like the original.