Student of Trinity

It might be easier to understand how national economies differ from households by thinking about how the extremely rich are different from working stiffs. A working family may have just one bank account and one mortgage or credit card or car loan, but once you get very wealthy, you start to talk about 'net worth', because you're likely to have a lot of your wealth tied up in a broad range of different assets. You may owe many millions on various outstanding obligations, yet have many more millions of equity elsewhere. Sometimes very rich people wind up with negative net worth (and stop being rich), but often the huge debts are a winning strategy that lets the rich get richer, by giving them leverage: If you invest at 10% return with 90% borrowed funds, your return on your own capital is 100% instead of 10%. Anyway, it may be quite sensible for very rich people to run deficits, in terms of cash income and debt: if they have assets that are increasing in value, their net worth may well be rising. If Donald Trump buys a building, the value of the building is counted as part of his net worth, along with the debt he incurs to buy the building. But if the US government builds a highway, and pays its workers, who educate their children, the usual kind of accounting doesn't keep track of the national assets gained in the process. The money might as well have been burnt, as far as the ledger is concerned; but that's not really true. So in some ways the government has it easier than working families — it can print money — but in other ways it is evaluated less fairly.

I don't know about other weird flavors of 7.62 round, but the NATO 7.62x51 and 5.56x45 rounds are high-powered rifle ammunition. Both go through body armor and car doors like paper.

Simon James Alexander Ragsdale the Third

It's not so clear how bad deficit spending is for industrialized nation states. There's not enough history to tell, because things are always different this time. I think the main issue is that major economies are so rich that they always could pay off their debts pretty quickly if they really had to, and because of that, nobody really minds keeping the debt open and just collecting interest payments. I mean, if the USA suddenly gave me the trillion dollars it owed me, what would I do with it? That's too much cash to do anything with, right away. I'd look around for a safe place to invest it. Hey, how about US Treasury bills?

I think the ratio of hazard to utility for handguns is worse than for cars. I'm not really sure what exactly all these 'special' military units normally do. A lot of information about them is probably secret. Some of them have very specialized roles, while others are very broad and use a very broad range of equipment. In general I'd be surprised if they relied on pistol ammunition very often, because pistol bullets don't go through obstacles well, or body armor. That's fine if you can count on getting clear shots at bad guys, but if I were sending in the SAS, I wouldn't want to have to count on optimal circumstances. The thing about cavalry charging infantry squares is that they never really did. The hope was always to catch the infantry before they could form proper squares. Once they did form squares, the cavalry were useless. Horses won't even try to jump over or run through a wall of guys with long sharp things. So cavalry would charge up, veer aside, and ride past. Then they'd ride around for a while looking for a square with a problem, and the two sides would trade potshots. Then the cavalry would ride away, and hope that some cannon can hit the infantry while they were still in tight squares, before they could spread out into line again. The cannon were also the reason that the infantry didn't want to form squares too soon. It was a tricky timing problem for everyone. At least that's all what I was told when I was doing Napoleonic era reenactments. The only time I had to face a re-enacted cavalry charge was for the 175th anniversary of Waterloo, at Waterloo. They kept the horses well away from us, for safety reasons, and anyway those guys looked as though they were having a hard enough time just staying on their mounts. For what it's worth, it did seem plausible to me that our hedge of bayonets would scare away horses, even genuine cavalry horses. The back rank in the square hold their muskets up vertically, so the obstacle is definitely too high for any horse to jump.

The analogy between a legal guardian and elected officials is a poor one, and it's poor in an important way. A legal guardian would only affect me, and would deprive me of the individual citizen's rights that I still do hold under representative democracy. Elected officials govern everyone. The laws affecting everyone, which are currently enacted and executed by elected officials, would still have to exist under direct democracy. Direct democracy would thus not make me any freer. Laws would still be passed, which I would have to obey, along with everyone else. To imagine that I would be freer, just because I had cast my vote on each measure as it came up, is merely to indulge in the fantasy that everyone else would always agree with me. In reality, this would not be the case.

I'm not sure that's true about slashing having more force. You don't thrust with a sword the way you poke a cue ball. It's a full-body lunge. At least in the Canadian infantry, when I was in it, not even company commanders carried pistols. Everyone below colonel just had rifles. I don't really know — I've only fired pistols a few times, and the last thing I was going to do was wave the things around — but I don't think a pistol is really any faster to point than a rifle. You've got two hands on the rifle, near opposite ends, so it's pretty quick to twist it back and forth. Handguns just frighten me. Their odds of hurting someone are way too high, so they're dangerous as recreational devices, but their odds of incapacitating an intended target aren't nearly high enough, so they're ineffective as weapons. About cavalry carrying pistols: I heard once that Napoleonic era cavalrymen would sometimes try to break infantry squares by shooting their own horses just as they approached the infantry line, on the theory that a dead horse would tumble through a line of bayonets that no living horse would approach. Was this tactic ever really tried? I don't know, and I'm not sure how to guess. It's an idiotic idea, but we're talking about cavalry.

The American system of government isn't the same as representative democracy in general. The American system is representative democracy 0.8, a good initial stab at the problem that has been cast in stone for over 200 years of radical change. No other countries now operate anything much like the gridlock-prone American system of checks and balances, which has turned out to be an overly cumbersome defense against forms of tyranny that just aren't really as threatening as they used to seem in the 18th century. As a modern form of democracy, the American system has severe flaws that will be hard to fix.

I'm not sure you necessarily need a two-party system, but few-party systems are crucial for democracy, because they enforce consistency of collective opinions. A possibly divergent bunch of people hammer out a compromise that is logically consistent across the board, on all the issues, as a total package. Then, with strong party discipline, votes are contests among such blocs. It would still technically be possible to have a discursive dilemma with as few as three parties, but I think it would be easier to see that it was happening, and easier to resolve. In practice there are more issues to debate than just the three issues involved in the dilemma, and how the three parties felt about the other issues would tend to drive coalitions to resolve the dilemma over the three problematic ones. Direct democracy is a fantasy of simplicity. It only works when there's only one issue to decide. What horrifies DD advocates — people's real opinions on an issue getting overridden by back-room compromises related to other issues — is exactly what democracy needs, to cope with the many complex and inter-related issues of the modern world. Without the compromises needed to mount a coherent party platform, direct democracy is just one massive discursive dilemma, with no feasible policy enacted at all. What we need is not just representative democracy rather than direct. It's democracy with strong parties — and not single-issue parties, but major parties that offer across-the-board platforms which address all issues. One could conceivably have parties without representatives, functioning as enormous civic clubs. But once there is party discipline, there's no reason to have everyone vote independently, when a party's members have already compacted to vote for the party line. The obviously intelligent practical measure is for the party-club to appoint a few executives to investigate cases, frame motions, and cast the collective vote. So, given parties, representatives are a simple step. As I've argued on other threads about this stuff (and these are not my original ideas, just stuff I've read somewhere), a large modern party is itself an electorate. It frames its coherent platform as a compromise between several blocs and wings within its membership, just as the actual legislature will eventually hammer out legislation as a compromise among parties. Intra-party blocs and wings are informal sub-parties. And in big enough groups, the blocs and wings will have internal blocs and wings. And so on, if need be. The ultimate principle seems to be one of hierarchy. Form many nested levels of parties/blocs, and reach consensus locally at each level. This keeps everything consistent much better than direct votes by a huge electorate on a complex battery of issues.

The really big problem with direct democracy, however, has nothing to do with voter stupidity or laziness. It's an inherent mathematical problem with democracy, called the Discursive Dilemma. The classic example of the Discursive Dilemma serves to illustrate the very general point: Suppose a third of the electorate wants to raise taxes, maintain services, and balance the budget. Another third (roughly) wants to cut taxes, cut services, and balance the budget. The remaining near third of the people wants to cut taxes, maintain services, and borrow money. Each of those three roughly equal policy platforms is at least self-consistent. Each of them could in principle be carried out. There's at least some kind of case to be made for all three of them. And every voter is both rational and honest. They set their priorities, and are willing pay for them. But look at the majority vote: Raise or lower taxes? Lower them, by a whopping majority. Cut or maintain services? Maintain them, by a whopping majority. Balance the budget, or borrow? Balance the budget, by yet another whopping majority. The clear majority of the people is in favor of a flagrant impossibility: cut taxes, maintain services, and yet balance the budget. The majority vote by direct democracy is idiotic, even when all the individual voters are rational and honest. The problem is that there is no 'the' majority. There are three different majorities, on each of the three different issues. And there is nothing that forces these different majorities to thresh out a compromise platform that, as a whole, is at least possible. Representative democracy, and more than that, party politics, is necessary to prevent democracy from deteriorating into irresponsible wishing for the impossible. Direct democracy is logically disastrous.

The bad guys don't need to bribe all the passengers with gold. They can just dazzle them with glitter. After all, that's what the captains do with the gold they get from the bad guys. The bad guys could just do it themselves, directly. The voters can evidently be swayed by the glitziest TV ad campaign. After all, that's what all the bribery in US politics is about. Congresspeople aren't taking cash to buy themselves speedboats and whiskey. They're taking campaign contributions, which go to buy TV ads, which are worth buying because they work. If they didn't work, there wouldn't be a corruption problem in US politics. Since they do work, direct democracy won't help.

Currently, in the United States of America, nothing stops anyone from running for high office. Nothing stops anyone from voting for anyone. Apparently, however, a bunch of crooked toadies for rich corporate interests can get re-elected season after season, because a plurality of voters can be had by throwing money at TV. So the American ship of state is one whose landlubber passengers choose their crew by vote, and they keep choosing bozos who ply them with rum. The proposal for direct democracy is to fix this, by inviting those same inept passengers to vote on each turn of the wheel, each reef of the sails. But if they can't even choose a captain, why do you think they can steer?

Yeah, polearms have obvious disadvantages, though they also had enough advantages that I think they gave swords quite a run for their money, historically. In Europe at least, the last dominant infantry weapon before firearms was the pike. I'm not surprised shorter weapons were popular, though. I was mainly wondering why short spears or axes or maces weren't as iconic as swords. I think the main reason they still make pistols is just portability for people who won't use the weapon very often. Soldiers and hunters, who are out there for the sole purpose of shooting, don't usually carry pistols.

Bingo, I think. For a quite short sword, like the Roman gladius, the main point might just have been that it was a short spear whose haft could not be grabbed by an opponent because it was sharp; but even there, I think that a short spear with a haft covered in spikes would have been much cheaper, if that was the only issue. It was probably important that a legionary could slash with the blade as well, and at least injure or intimidate his opponent that way, even if the weapon was only really lethal in stabbing. I think Khoth probably has it, that slashing with the full length of the blade was the killer app for a sword, even if it wasn't actually as effective as stabbing. An opponent has to be pretty heavily armored, with no weak spots, to be able to completely ignore a slashing blade. It's easy to make a thrusting weapon, but adding slashing gives you a much wider range of attacks, and that's probably a qualitative difference, once you know how to use the sword well. Maybe a guy with a sword would just have a huge advantage over any other kind of weapon, in most cases, because he could slash as well as thrust.

That does seem to be the case. I'm still not sure why, though. What's so great about swords? In what sense does the idea of a sword 'work'?

Swords in general puzzle me. Why is it so good to have a weapon that is all edge except for its handle? Why isn't a spear just better? Was it more a matter that swords are all metal, and hence stronger? Was it seriously a problem that opponents would chop through the haft of a pole arm? Or was it just that if your enemy got past the point of your spear, the haft could only give them a bit of a bonk? Was it the full edge of the sword, that gave the sword the edge? Really ancient literature seems to deal mostly with spears and arrows, I seem to recall. Swords were a technological advance. They're not easy to make, because they need to be both strong and sharp. A dull sword isn't much good, but metal tempered to hold an edge is much more brittle than the kind of metal one normally thinks of, and it breaks surprisingly easily. So a sword has to be made in layers, with a tough but soft (for metal) core and a hard but brittle surface. A sword blade is a feat of metallurgy. In the 1960's, the sword my father had as part of his dress uniform was still the traditional pattern that went back to before WWI, and it was meant to be usable in battle. He still has it, and I carried it myself for a while when I was in the reserve battalion of his old regiment. Its blade could hold a sharp edge if it were ever sharpened; it was made by Wilkinson Sword, which now only makes razor blades. The blade is somewhere around 30 inches long I think, and may an inch in breadth. It's not very thick, and it's really flexible sideways. It can bend into the shape of a bow, and spring right back straight. The blade is light, and the hilt is a big basket guard, so the balance point is only slightly above your hand. It's an impressive piece of technology. It's also pretty clearly the ultimate refinement of swords, with the design and material that they attained just as they were going extinct as weapons. A lot of art went into that blade. I'm still not quite sure why it was ever worth it.

My new favorites are the Pirate Blade and the Spectral Falchion. They're all generally pretty awesome, though. The only one I'm still not sure about is the Fury Crossbow. So many wings; it's hard to see the actual shape. I'm beginning to think that the whole wing idea for it may just not work.

We have one of those things, too. It's awesome. You plug your ATM card into this little red plastic box, and type your PIN into its keypad. Then you go to the bank's website on your computer. With each transaction, a little portion of the screen starts flashing jumbled black and white squares, and you hold the little red box up to the screen, to let it see the pattern. After a while, it's seen enough, and it spits out a six-digit TAN code. The only link between the TAN generator and the internet is optical. It sounds like something I'd post as a joke, but it's real.

Memes are often generated from each other by simple replication, but the process can be dangerous. Sometimes one iteration is an improvement but the next is too much. For example: Me: Meme: Mememe:

It's a very hard time of year after losses. I really hope 2014 will bring some good things your way, Valdain.

Yes, I think it is similar. Lighter in theme; somewhere between Tolkien and fairy tale. So far I've really only seen about half the game.

The Kennerspiel des Jahres for 2013 is a strange thing called Legends of Andor. 'Kennerspiel' means a more complicated board game, a game for experts. It's a new category added a year or two ago to the venerable German game of the year prize. We bought the thing in German, but then found it in Canada in English, for about three times the price. It's an interesting game, and in no plausible sense a competitor to Spiderweb, so I thought I'd describe it, because some people here might like it. It's a co-operative game for two to four players, kind of an FRPG but turned into a board game. Not a kiddy-style board game, but a massive and complicated German board game, with an enormous board. Despite being a Kennerspiel it's not actually all that complicated to play, because it consists of five successive games that might each last an hour or so, and that each involve some different mechanics. So the total number of rules is large, but you don't use them all at once. It's co-operative, with adversaries controlled either randomly or by scripted cards. Players move in turns, but you can fight together if your figures are co-located, and fighting together makes a huge difference. A single player can usually take the game's weakest monster alone, but not the second-weakest, while two players together can take either weaker monster in a single round. It's not necessarily easy to win, though. Some monsters are much tougher, and there are other tasks to accomplish, while fending off a steadily advancing monster horde, within a time limit. There seem to be a lot of choices to make as to which resources to gather.

Whatever Jeff is doing, he's been doing it for around twenty years now. I've never run a business of any kind for even one year. I wouldn't dream of giving Jeff business advice.

I'm just going to leave this here. Click the link at your own risk. There are dangerous things out there on the internet, after all.

Grammatical pedantry may not be sufficient in itself for nightmarishness, but it does help a bit.