Silent Storm was a fantastic game, one of my favorite tactical turnbased games.

Credit/debit systems appear to have existed for at least 5000 years. Money is just an abstraction technology to make the credit/debit economy work more smoothly and scale up.

As money is a foundational tech for civilization, you’d need to find a replacement tech that serves much the same purpose, but avoids whatever downsides you feel outweigh it’s benefits. That’s a hard problem.

Then implement it in such a way that civilization doesn’t implode during the transition. This is a very hard problem.

And then prevent humanity from finding a way to exploit that tech for the benefit of the few, bringing you right back where you started. This is a nearly impossible problem.

I get that Ukraine won’t consider the possibility of ceding any territory, nor should they. They probably don’t like their allies even mentioning it.

But, there’s the separate issue of not being able to join NATO with ongoing territorial disputes. Without much context to go on, I would almost interpret this as something more along the lines of “Ukraine could join NATO tomorrow if the dispute went away (by whatever method)”.

Its amusing how this thread went from the legitimacy of various naval exercises and then shifted to trade policy when that didn’t pan out, which is an entirely different animal, its more of an elephant than a zebra. (It ain’t black and white, definitely grey.)

Trying to get me to defend the Cuba trade embargo ain’t gonna happen, because it really is pointless and harmful. But I like how its conveniently ignored that the rest of the world could easily more than cover what the US refuses to send to Cuba. The US Navy wouldn’t stop them from doing so, because the blockade ended decades ago.

But oddly enough, that doesn’t happen. I wonder why not? Because, oh no, what would the world do without more of those sweet, sweet dollars??? Yeah, never mind the ethics, one can’t forgo profits from trade with the US, so let’s go fuck the Cubans right along with the Americans, and keep our citizens fat and happy with a steady supply of Levis, Big Macs, and movies. But, you know, lets continue paying lip service to how bad it is while making money hand over fist in complicity.

A truly astounding amount of hypocrisy. The US has plenty of hypocrisy to go around too, but at least I am not going to try to defend it.

I am mostly sure the naval blockade of Cuba ended well before I was born, so there is zero freedom of navigation issue happening currently.

The embargo only applies to US companies, we aren’t stopping other countries from continuing to trade witch Cuba.

I mean, it’s stupid as hell, and will never work, but that’s about the extent of it.

The US ain’t paradise, I am not gonna argue that. But we were talking about naval policy. We definitely don’t have children serving in the navy 😜

I mean, they don’t have to be allowed in international waters, you just need to get all the planet’s seafaring countries to dedicate all of their naval resources to a blockade of the US.

The cheaper option is to realize that the USN is generally pretty serious about enforcing freedom of navigation in a way essentially noone else is able to, which is a net positive for the planet. Even when you factor in some of the shady activities and plain old fuckups that they are occasionally involved in.

Frankly I’d be thrilled if China would actually act like the modern global power they clearly want to become, rather than joining Russia in some 1800s imperial LARPing vs the rest of the world.

Except those waters aren’t Chinese territory, which is the entire point of doing freedom of navigation cruises…to remind them of that fact

The recent China-Russia operation was also in international waters, and you’ll notice it’s only a handful of senators making a stink about it to get some publicity, the military was pretty clear that it wasn’t a problem. They just shadow it like they always do.

It’s mostly decent, some interesting twists, but also plenty of dumb stuff in it too. It’s only 7 episodes, so even if you don’t end up liking it you haven’t wasted much time!

The Empire focused half of the show that was mostly made up specifically for the show is EXCELLENT tho, and really worth watching.

They should have just stuck with that and called the show Empire IMHO. Would have been an instant classic.

Frankly, you’ll enjoy Foundaton more if you don’t read the books first. Otherwise, you’ll be sitting there shaking you head wondering why they continuously mangle the core concept of the books so badly, despite characters occasionally directly stating how it works (only for the same episode otherwise showing utter disregard for said statement)

Show was killed way to soon. It was pretty solid!

Season 1 was definitely the highlight of the show. But the later seasons were still pretty entertaining.

Dunno if Lexx is really worth it tbh. The original movies were worth watching just because it was so weird and different.

But if you were on the fence after those, well it doesn’t really change. Just season after season of the same sort of plots…if you like that, it’s great. If you don’t, it’s gonna get old really fast.

I rewatched all of Andromeda recently, and after a season and a half is was mostly awful, but it was occasionally entertaining.

I rewatched the first Lexx movie, remembered why I never finished the show the first time around, and moved on to something else.

Andromeda had such promise for a low budget SciFi show. The writing started out pretty good…then purple went gold and the writing IMMEDIATELY went to shit, no slow downward slide or anything. It was like a totally different show midway thru season 2, have never seen anything like it before or since.

Heck yeah, watched all of those, they were so fun. Cleopatra 2525 is one I had almost forgotten about, thanks for reminding me!

If you missed SG1, I am guessing you missed Farscape too. It really makes aliens actually Alien, it’s universe is so weird and fantastic. And the characters and their interactions are great.

Definitely worth adding to the list.

It’s really an entirely different animal than either of them, but ranks right up there with them in terms of quality.

SG1 is a 50/50 serious/fun ratio, with long running plot threads mixed in with adventure- of-the-week episodes. It’s a bunch of friends saving the galaxy and having fun doing it. It’s got a real sense of Earth’s slow progression from the mostly forgotten backwater homeworld of humanity all the way to being a major power in two galaxies.

B5 is like a 90% serious novel about war and politics.

BSG is 100% grim, and it becomes really obvious in later seasons that while the Cylons might’ve had a plan, the writers sure as shit didn’t know what it was supposed to be. This unfortunately makes it overall the weakest of the three IMHO.