Toxn

This topic is supposed to be a bit of a mess - it was posted in regards to what I see as surreal hand-wringing by the world's largest military over an issue that smaller militaries have dealt with (to one extend or another) already. As Colli and Donward point out, part of the problem is that the US has some really fucked up incentives when it comes to the politics of seeming rather than actually doing. When your social/legal system in general works to the benefit of the most litigatious and hysterical (and whitest, but another time) then any substantive changes are always going to be sabotaged by whiners on both sides. What I object to is that some of the whiners are attempting to cloak their core argument with disingenuous logic. Per X's posts, you need to be willing to look at what works and tear the whole thing down if need be to get it. This is where Sturgeon and I are fundamentally different: we both believe in maximisation of value/potential. But we have very different takes on the best approach to realise this. In any case, just by being willing to talk about this stuff from fundamentals, I feel we're already ahead of the curve. So, on with the show! Dealt with in the OP - link for the former and general disclaimer/trolling for the latter. We've talked about this before, but I find it interesting where traditionalists draw the line at what constitutes a valid tradition. Some of our ancestors totally ate afterbirth, just as some of our more recent ones fully supported separate-but-equal. Picking a particular tradition over another is, in itself, an act of revisionism. As to glory and honor, it wasn't women who scoured those from the face of the earth. It was empire and four years of industrialised slaughter at the beginning of the 20th century. The first world war killed these traditional values with the same ruthless efficiency that it killed the boys who held them.

Are you by any chance suffering from self inflicted, prophecy-related blindness? Because that's a pretty common side effect and you should really talk to your physician about mitigation strategies. Happy incomprehensible US holiday!

Since War on the Rocks is determined to hash this one out, I'd like to start a thread on women in the armed forces. First, though, a disclaimer: I am very fond of argument by absurdity. Not because it is a great way to prove a point or convince people (it isn't), but because it is a great way to expose the underlying assumptions leading into a particular stance on a topic and where they bend/break. Further, I (don't think I am) on either of the sides that seem to have sprung up around this debate. Rather, my view is that what you want going in should determine what you argue for. I get very annoyed at people who profess to want one thing and build up arguments around it, but limit the scope/conclusions of their arguments in such a way that they reveal another agenda. I'm very naively anti-hypocrisy, in other words. With that out of the way, on with the show! One of the things that often gets raised when the subject teh womyn in teh army comes up is how this will inevitably dilute standards or ruin unit cohesion. While these do have merit, and deserve to be discussed as such, I often find the argument disingenuous. As I'm more focused on standards (and WoTR has done the cohesion debate to death) I will deal with this aspect first and wait to see what people want to discuss later. One of the underlying arguments of this approach is the idea of efficiency. I'm going to run with this, because the implications are interesting and I've already warned you all about my approach to argument. Since I'm now stumping for efficiency, it pays to examine what men and women bring to the table. Men are stronger, of course - not only in absolute terms but also in relative terms. Upper body strength, especially, is where dudes are always going to have an edge on ladies. However, once you account for size and body mass differences, a lot of the other differences go away. Similarly, tests for things like G-tolerance tend to point to gross physical factors rather than gender per se. Of course, gender is well-correlated with specific gross physical factors.Turning to intelligence and psychology, the general consensus seems to be that intelligence is the same while men get the lion's share of issues relating to autism, suicide and aggression. With education the data is murky but seems to show a general trend towards higher literacy in women; with learning disabilities and a slight advantage in maths being for men. Women also have a known tendency to become the majority of students in tertiary institutions, leading to a rebuttable assumption that being female provides some sort of general socio-biological advantage in education. So where does this leave us? Obviously, in cases where more overall and upper body strength is needed, then men will be -on average- better at doing whatever it is that you need upper body strength for. Where compact dimensions, ability to withstand G-loading and ease of education are needed, then women should be your first pick. We can, of course, take this further, assuming you don't mind generalising: African Americans are much more likely to respond well to strength and endurance conditioning, white Americans are much more likely to have terribly eyesight, Americans in general are more likely to be morbidly obese and so on. Here, the cold-eyed proponent of military efficiency must draw up a roster of those best suited for their roles: men (preferably African American) in the infantry and anything involving grunt work (hauling ordinance, maintenance in places where mechanical advantage and power tools are considered outré and so forth). Women on the other hand, should be first pick for combat aircraft, tanks and anything involving a modicum of education. With rigorous screening and a suitably discrete task:gender/race list, it is assumed that maximum combat efficiency can be achieved.

I have great memories of soloing a match or two in WoWP. My overall feeling is that there is a perfect aerial combat game out there somewhere, but that WoWP and WT ain't it. I'll wait and hope until the coming of our one true lord and maneauver-fighter. Until then, I'll do the best I can with a dead game and a broken one.

It turns out that I'm also pretty good at WoWP (mainly in American and British planes). Which is... odd, considering how aggressively average I am at nearly any other game type. Unfortunately, it turns out that lag starts to really matter once you get to high-speed props and early jets. So I ended up maxing out the planes I could play and didn't progress further. With WT, on the other hand, it's really hard to tell if anyone is any good. I mean, I just played three matches where I got my wing torn off on the first pass after a 5 minute flight in. So I don't even know if any skills are involved here.

I have a sad placr in my heart for WoWP. Spent time in closed beta, enjoyed large chunks of the game and got to see it die on release...

They were well on the way to being a first-world economy already. MacArthur and occupation just gave them resources and time to reintegrate and (carefully) forget. Same for Western Germany.

Relevant.

Papua New Guinea provides some good examples of islands as carefully managed ecosystems - again, see Jared Diamond's Collapse. I know that there are lots of non engineering subjects out there, but even those have theory. Try looking for any focused, mechanistic research on closed ecosystems and the management thereof and you realise we have almost none. Even ecology quo ecology tends to run away from any sort of a priori analysis of the systems it examines, and often seems to be more content with general rules and trends.

I'm firmly of the opinion that simple conservation is a railed ideology and yet another example of how hippies ruin things. What we really need is to move away from our absurd natural/manmade mindset and really get into the nuts and bolts of designing and maintaining ecosystems. For instance, it blows my mind that we have almost no formal studies (not eveb a good theoretical framework) for how to produce a stable, closed ecosystem. Or an ecosystem equivalent of the standardised biological parts initiative. We're still tinkering when we should be frantically designing, essentially.

Agreed. This makes me think what we want is verisimilitude, rather than realism. It also reminds me of the issues inherent in top-down vs. bottom-up simulation. Some of WT's issues can then be seen as stemming from attempts at bottom-up, realistic simulation: the idea that if you make the physics and mechanics as close to real as possible, then the play will naturally result in more realistic scenarios and outcomes. Unfortunately, going this route tends to result in unexpected, emergent behaviour when your things bump up against the limits of the realism you have provided. Like you said, a top-down approach is often better on this regard due to the fact that the designer gets to set limits on mechanical interactions and has more power to balance things. Even so, I tend to find that I enjoy more slavishly realistic games (especially where realistic physics is involved) just because the weirdness thay results is in itself entertaining. tl;dr: fuck the jpz IV/70 and all the tools who bought it from such a shamelessly predatory company. And fuck the La-5, at least until I can get one.

It should also be mentioned that part of the problem with realism in games is that it tends to make unrealistic stuff stand out even more. So, for instance, the fact that WTGF BR3 consists almost entirely of Tigers vs. various flavours of IS bugs me more than it would otherwise.

I have no idea what an SWJ is and haven't seen any in real life.

Okay, so I'm working off my phone (power failure) with a baby on my lap. In any case, here is a quick rundown: Hippies suck. They've essentially shut down GMO research in Europe (over 60% of all test fields get destroyed), demonstrating that terrorism works like gangbusters when you're sufficiently white and well-off. On that note, it's also a myth that hippies are some sort of sidelined underclass. The truth is that hippies were always the scions of the upper crust and think and act in ways that the romantic aristocrats would fully understand. Which also explains why so many of them wholeheartedly embrace population control and euthanasia to prevent those overbreedin' third worlders from sucking up mother earth's scarce resources. As to their other relationships with the poors, hippies are generally much happier with dependance and 'noble' poverty than they are with development and investment. Which is one of the reasons why we still have a ridiculously destructive and predatory food-aid system rather than anything helpful. Finally, a personal story: a few years ago, I was holidaying in the Cape during the fire season. At this time, there were two major events playing out in the area. The first was a series of massive fires in the Cape flats, which killed many people and left hundreds homeless. The second was a confused humpback whale which beached itself near Hermanus. The latter resulted in candle-lit vigils and numerous, expensive attempts to return the poor addled creature to the sea. When it inevitably died, there was an outpouring of grief by the well-off hippies who had gone to light candles next to the beast. The former resulted in shrugs.

From numerous discussions on rocketpunk manifesto (which is an awesome site btw, if a bit neglected) my impression is that part of the problem is that there simply isn't a market for more launches and no concievable way to develop one sans... well, more launch capacity. The old economic chicken-and-egg issue, basically.

Always reminds me of Goya for some reason...

I will try.

You get used to it. Besides, that's hardly the most wonky game design issue there (coughbattleratingcough).

All the above ring true. In WT's defence, however, I'd argue that realism implies a certain level of random confusion. I just wish they would then run with realism instead of also introducing gamefied bullshit. On another tangent, I love how WTGF's matchmaking and metagame as an argument for how overrated a lot of German gear is.

So, WoT/WoW vs WT/WTGF... I know it's been hashed out before, but I'd kind of like to discuss it from a design/play perspective instead a whine/wish-fulfilment fantasy one (background reading). For my money, WT is enjoyable but commits some of the cardinal sins of the Free-to-play/pay-to-win model. There is an obscene level of grinding, along with ridiculous advantages for the lucky few who can afford to sink a fortune into it. Don't even get me started on premium vehicles. On the other hand; it's hella pretty, realistic/simulation battles are my thing and the pacing is slow enough so that my ridiculous lag doesn't make me too uncompetitive. WoT, on the other hand, is a more polished online game; with better balance (yes really) and more tactical play than 'point at thing, click button'. Additionally, I feel that WoT is the better model for free-to-play: less pandering to whales and less obvious money-sinks means that the player base is likely to remain bigger and more active than WT. I'd value your thoughts here, on the strict basis that this doesn't generate into another whine/gloat thread.

Anyone care to mock up a 6.66X66.6mm* cartridge, convert it to Imperial and then use it to bamboozle the GPC-plebs? It's the satanic thing to do, after all... * Bonus points if it has a velocity of 666m/s, steel case or sulphur-rich propellant...

Seconding T__As suggestion. Vote to include the caveat 'even when they are on yhe right side of the debate'.

I have precisely no detailed knowledge of how nuclear fission works, so I am unqualified to speak to the major content of this post. However, as a (barely) qualified gene-jockey and grizzled GMO warrior I can personally attest to the fact that hippies are simply the worst. Further, I know from bitter experience that they simply cannot be placated, reasoned with or bargained with.

Posting on my phone, but I do have a link somewhere to an article arguing that the main issue with IFVs is the loss of boots. Apparently the tradeoff of extra firepower just isn't worth losing the ability to plug holes in the line or cover more area. That said, the recommendation was to have a good mix of motorised and mechanised infantry, rather than an either/or.

"Collapse" covered it in detail, including the interesting tidbit that the one the the colonists absolutely refused to do was fish.