I’ve never really been interested in playing Pax Pamir, but now I know it’s a game about fighting over the reins of a rickety stagecoach it sounds a lot more fun than I thought!
Speaking of the Soviets. Cold War American foreign policy wonks cannot imagine a world without the USSR. (And so you had that crazy wave of hot philosophical takes like Huntington’s during the 90s) A lot of the fundamental socio-economic issues in the Warsaw Pact was only known in hindsight.
Also, I disagree with the whole Roman Empire comparison that people make (Note: this is more of a general statement. Not directed to anyone. Because you always hear these stuff on different places). One is an agrarian empire who didn’t know what Inflation is and - from Augustus Caesar all the way to the fall of Constantinople - the Roman Empire kept having civil wars on an average of once per decade. Imagine being in a country where you have, on average, a civil war every decade? The other is a country that broke from their mid-20th Century stagflation and won the Cold War and even left the rest of the OECD countries to eat dirt post-GFC. Rome comparisons are for Doomers.
With the exception of a Hot War with the Soviets, the US is/was never in mortal threat once the British gave up on their rebel colonies. So, yeah, you guys are, indeed, fine and your fundamentals are better (in my measure) than any developed country or rival country (well, so far…). The threat has always been internal, and that’s easier to deal with than you think it is. Easy to say that these are violent times because they are. But I often see that the past was much more violent, even if we restrict ourselves to Modern History.
The belief on why this is the case is because Americans today are TOO comfortable and TOO bored out of their minds. Too bored, so you see these LARPers who want a revolution or a civil war or some bullshit. But they are too comfortable so, once pushed into these, they don’t actually want one, because these are too inconvenient.
What I do find concerning is the power of the President which have been way too strong since President FDR. Keep in mind that only a rare handful of countries with Presidential System made it without succumbing to dictatorship within 30 years. The US has been lucky but I feel like their luck is running out on this one.
You are picking the wrong time period of Roman history though. People usually mean the period before Augustus when Rome had no serious external enemy anymore (which is comparable to what you described about the US) and developed worse and worse internal problems which caused several civil wars till Augustus brought stability and peace to the empire again (by changing the whole political system).
On a side note: I think World War II counts as a serious mortal threat to the country even after “the British gave up on their rebel colonies”.
The comparisons don’t work of course but there are some similarities in the political system. One of them is that both systems rely / relied a lot on unwritten rules which is fine and dandy as long as everybody follows this codex.
But there is always someone thinking why shouldn’t I do this or that? What stops me? So piece by piece the limits of the system are pushed and strained till something gives.
And in a very general way you could compare the US to Rome in that regard. But it is not really working because both are very different in so many ways. It is just that people like looking back and drawing their conclusions from history.
I think people only make the US/Rome link because they’re both big, dominant things that feel (and presumably felt) permanent* - not because they worked the same way.
*But of course nothing’s permanent.
I remember reading a book where apparently a traveller in southern Gaul in the sixth century asked the owner of a large estate how he felt after the fall of Rome, and they laughed and were convinced the empire still stood. Perhaps there will be people like that after today’s nations have fallen.
Well, to some extent, it still did!
Been kind of a crappy evening. My kid purposefully broke my cellphone by throwing it at the ground twice while I was busy helping my other kid un the bathroom. Later I got a call from work (on ny work cell) because there had been a power outage at the plant, and I spent close to two hours helping get everything back up and running. Still not sure if I am out of the woods yet, as the Production Manager still was going to check a few more things.
Ugh, I hope your evenings and days have been much less crappy since.
The busiest month I’ve had in years is finally almost over and I didn’t even get to got to SPIEL. Just one more business trip this week and then I can finally… relax and “just work”.
Doesn’t help I caught a pretty bad cold along the way and my voice still hasn’t fully returned because I went and decided working with a cold was a brilliant idea that allowed me to go to a metal concert I had bought tickets for half a year ago.
Just one more week…
(totally the reason I have not played any games or posted much, also possible Borderlands 4 as brain candy and One Piece binging because my bandwidth after work is non-existent)
Yesterday I was (digitally) approached by two people:
The first is a recruiter for far-off Ottawa (about 5 hours drive from where I live) for a tech Sales management position. Ottawa is a beautiful city, and the pitch was interesting, despite me not working in the R&D field for almost a decade… I’ll talk to them, but I’m curious why they reached out to me. But, who knows, maybe it will be really interesting and I’ll take the plunge back in. Pay would have to be remarkable to uproot me and the family, though.
Second was a promoter offering to extend the visibility of one of my lesser known (but better) books. Her offer was basically $20-$27 per reviewer for up to 3,000 reviewers, but the money spent was for “Time and effort” and not for a review (which is a nice way of saying you spend the money and you might get a review, or not, and it might be positive, or not).
I mean, paying people to take copies of my book? Even if I had the kinda money that would let that happen (“You can start with as few as 25 readers!” Lemme do the math on that real quick… “only” $500, probably USD, meaning $700+ CAD), I’m not sure I would? Which is probably why I only sell a dozen books a month.
Ah well. Nothing worthwhile is ever easy, right? Maybe the tech job will be really cool, pay really well, and my partner won’t immediately despise the idea of moving if we have to?
I hope you find clarity on this decision.
Can your partner just move like that in regards to their job and life?
Technically yes, since they work remotely (they’re a bookkeeper). Their business partner lives in St. Catherines and they only get together to discuss client-issues once a month at most.
I would still hesitate unless it’s an exceptional offer, though, because we have roots in Kitchener (not least of which is that we own our house). But I had to move us here from Toronto when my old job stopped being sufficiently paid to afford to stay in the city, so it wouldn’t be the first time we’ve had to move for work.
I’m torn. I know I’m worth more than what I’m being paid right now, but at the same time I really want to be writing, so running decisions through the calculus of “Will this allow me to do more writing” is hard. If the pay is good enough, and the work is engaging enough, maybe. I would love to not be constantly poor.
But I’m almost positive that nothing will come of this. It will be a team of 4 bright-eyed kids who want somebody willing to work 80+ hours a week for a song and potentially a big payout in a decade, and I’m just not there any more.
The plan this year: provide no guidance to children about how much candy they can take, but then watch and silently judge the parents.
Award for worst costume idea: ICE agents knocking on doors and then asking for candy.
Also bad for pushing into a crowded Halloween bar.
Saw one on Mastodon. You answwr the door, to find another doir with “please knock”. Knock, it opens, there are college students dressed as old ladies who admire your “costumes”, pinch your cheek, and hand out candy.
Notable Notes of Halloween:
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Neighbor parents dressed as
6and7respectively. This fad/meme should be, thankfully, fading from the zeitgeist soon now that adults are acknowledging it. -
When I was a child, it was merely rumored there was a house that gave out full-sized candy bars. My children managed to find 6 houses in a row this year that we giving out full-size candy bars… a couple of the houses gave out two full-size pieces to each child. I was forced to return to our home and return with a wagon and shopping bags so that the kids in our group could dump their full buckets and resume this ridiculousness.
As is tradition, nobody came by for Halloween this year because we live in a country where it is not as popular and we live on old-people-hill (the generation of my parents has yet to move out and give their huge places to families with kids).
I had a kind of cultural exchange with a younger colleague at our office Halloween party, in which I explained my Dad’s Army of Darkness shirt to them (they weren’t familiar with either of those things), and they explained someone else’s very impressive costume to me (it was a character from a recent popular video game).
We give out full size candy bars. We have 5 kids this year (a “Chase” from Paw Patrol, a Luigi, a different group with a Mario and a Jesus, and a Steve from Minecraft). “Sadly,” this leaves us with only 95 candy bars we will “have to” eat ourselves.
Aside: the Ottawa recruiter contacted me to say that they need somebody willing to be in the office, so thank you for my interest but no thank you. This is despite the fact that I emailed to say “I’d be willing to relocate if the position is interesting enough,” meaning that the recruiter failed pretty hard on reading comprehension, but since I expected nothing to come of it… no big surprise.