Zompist Bboard Again

Otto Kretschmer wrote: ↑Tue May 13, 2025 2:54 am @zompist
What's so controversial about my views?

Quite the opposite, they are conventional. It seems you want to redo every other apocalyptic story-- Fallout, Mad Max, etc. And you can! But why start by asking questions when you don't want to hear answers?

As for post-nuclear world - keep in mind that crime wouldn't be the only issue. Warlordism would be rampant after the situation stabilizes a bit after several decades Of course warlords won't be killing people at random but wars will be everpresent even without firearms. You asked a question in the...

You need to show me some good reasons to believe that these trends will not continue. No, we don't. You have to start listening to other people for once in your life. You obviously think you're smarter than anyone else, but by your own reckoning, what has this attitude gotten you? Despair and endle...

@zompist: If you look at, say, homicide rates - they are significantly higher in poor countries with weak (underfunded, corrupt etc.) law enforcement. OK, here's are some countries which have a lower homicide rate than the US : Kenya, Zambia, Mozambique, Angola, Turkey, India, Bangladesh, Azerbaija...

It's technological inertia, I guess. There's plenty of software and libraries for producing PDFs; epubs probably not so much. I don't know how often people have apps that can handle epubs. I have an epub reader on my phone, but how many people do? If only we had some technology, a "hypertext m...

Or to put it another way: could an armed gang terrorize the new agriculturalists? One: depends on the crop; you can steal the wheat from a granary, you can't steal potatoes from the ground. (They rot.) Two: in any predator-prey relationship, the predators can't outnumber or exterminate the prey. Th...

But if you're telling us that there are no articles outside of this forum, nowhere to see good news - and if your reason for that, is that you are actively ignoring the links...thats a different matter. Of course there's good news, malloc is just unable to accept anything but doom. As a test, I loo...

Is he though? The polls I have seen consistently put his approval rating in the mid-forties over the past few months. He may not have overwhelming support, but he certainly has more than Biden managed to achieve.

Meanwhile, in this timeline

A bunch of related but different words across multiple language families come from single PIE roots. Was PIE a simpler context-based language, or were its other useful words just lost over time? I think what you're noticing is not complexity, but the process of word creation. Almost always, people ...

The contrast between Zompist proclaiming hope about our situation and everything I am reading elsewhere feels ever more jarring. BREAKING NEWS: FAMOUS DOOMSCROLLER FINDS ONLY BAD NEWS WHILE DOOMSCROLLING ! If you're referring to my blog post, the message is not "hope", it's RESIST. Doomsc...

The assumption in (say) the Fallout video games is that devastation turns people into savages and cannibals, and you should put all your skill points into Guns. Very likely this is completely wrong. In a crisis situation, people are more cooperative, not less. I read an fascinating account from a su...

Ares Land wrote: ↑Fri May 09, 2025 3:17 am most cardinals were created (which is apparently the proper word?)

I would suggest "reddened". Or, given the etymological meaning 'like a hinge', "hinged." Then an excommunicated cardinal would be "unhinged."

Yeah, no, I know you'd prefer your country to keep being world police. What is wrong with you? It's bad enough that you're a cheerleader for fascists. You don't also have to be an asshole. how am i being an asshole though? america world police *is* what unipolarity means, and you think remaining un...

The end of the Cold War significantly helped the world, because the many dictators and factions in civil wars across the world were to a large extent not needed by the Great Powers anymore and could be dispensed with. This is why so many dictatorships fell and civil wars ended soon after the fall o...

1. My dictionary lists it as transitive, FWIW.
2. In Medieval Latin, yes! Dunno about classical.

Also, how much evidence do you have for your theory that multipolarity leads to fewer coups? According to Wikipedia's list of coups and coup attempts ³, and using 1970–1989 and 1990–2009 as samples of multipolarity and unipolarity respectively, there were 159 (just under 8 coup attempts a year ⁴) i...

the magas, on the other hand, seem to want to abandon that strategy. I don't think their new strategy will be more effective in keeping the us on top, and it isn't working out great thus far. Depends on what it is, doesn't it? If it's "ally with Russia and against all democratic nations",...

Oh, looking at your question in its original context reminded me of something else: the list of fallacies our Social Studies teacher went over in 7th grade. That grabbed me for some reason, and I'd say it's been useful all my life. But like most things in education, you can't count on something impo...

Honestly, how many bits of knowledge can you think of where all of the following are true: 1) You learned them in elementary or secondary school; 2) You still know them; and 3) You didn't learn them again later, during college/university, or as a part of job or additional training, or on your own, ...

At some point SF writers were enamored with the grimdark. You got the Singularity (the AI uprising is inevitable and the AIs are just mean ), the Dark Forest (the aliens are just mean ) and so on... In an interview Liu mentioned that other Chinese SF writers think he's an optimist! Apparently most ...