an open conspiracy is still a conspiracy.

US military hegemony isn’t a conspiracy, it’s a popular public policy

NDAA authorizing almost a trillion dollars to the military industrial complex

Congress authorizes it. I guess you could just put “Congress” on the list. Or maybe “The Pentagon”.

Hundreds of thousands of civilians have died by US bombing in the last fifty years.

With Iran, Syria, and Yemen you could probably get to 100k in one or two years.

Nevermind our airstrikes across Latin America, the various African states, and our collaborations with Israel in Gaza.

Hell, the US can take credit for quite a few kills in Ukraine thanks to our long standing policy of playing both ends against the middle.

But you don’t get all that out of “The NDAA exists”. We’ve been passing NDAAs since The Korean War without hitting this level of mass slaughter.

“I cast invisible”

“The hydra takes an AoO”

Queue from the top

It’s the same argument. The fundamental problem is that magic as a system doesn’t play well with rules as a concept

I tend to find an 2:1 or 3:1 combat/non-combat gives people a good mix of the action/adventure elements and the high drama. Combat just tends to take longer than drama, so even when you try to minimize it, you can often find yourself in a time-suck.

I also tend to feel that any “withering encounter” should resolve as soon as the players are more-or-less assured of victory (like, 2-3 turns, unless things go disastrously wrong for the players). Big center-piece boss battles can take longer, but need some kind of high drama element (exploding volcano, NPC dangling off a cliff, evil wizard powering up a death ray, etc) that (a) gives players a puzzle or drama point to resolve and (b) gives someone an opportunity to do something passionate or wacky (swinging in on a chandelier, flinging themselves on a hand grenade, asking their beau to marry them in the middle of a sword fight).

Any encounter that’s just “roll the dice, pass the turn” is a waste of everyone’s time, IMHO.

your turn should be no more than 1 minute at the longest

“I cast Invisibility”

“You can’t”

“Yes I can”

“No, you can’t, you’re in the Antimagic Field”

“No, I’m not. I’m on the edge of the field. Look at the table.”

“There’s still a corner of the field in the square.”

“Then I don’t stand in that corner.”

“The rules say it doesn’t matter.”

“No they don’t. It has to occupy at least 40% of the square.”

“Yes it does. Look, its right here in the DM’s guide.”

“That’s the 4.32 manual. You need to check the rules updates from 4.71”

“I’m not using 4.71 rules.”

“You referenced a 4.82 rule just a turn ago!”

“No I didn’t, that was a house rule.”

“That’s not anywhere in the house rule guide! I was just reading it before I cast my spell.”

“Well, I sent out an email two months ago.”

“GUYS! Just make a decision and move ON!”

“Okay, fine. I take a five foot step and cast Invisibility.”

“My hydra gets an AoO. I roll a 43 and deal 290 points of damage. Your wizard dies.”

“THIS IS BULLSHIT!”

sorcerer DM

I’ll also spot you that turn one is generally basic bitch shit.

It’s turn seven, when the wizard has gone through six prior Save or Sucks only to find out the DM has introduced another creature on which none of them work that they’re fumbling around for options.

by level 10 you should already know what spells you took and what they do at minimum

As often as not, the control wizard is trying to figure out if they can drop the AoE template to just hit the bad guys. Blaster Casters tend to have less of a problem because every turn is “Does it have fire resistance? Yes: Magic Missile / No: Scorching Ray”

The really annoying wizards are the Summoners, because “it’s my turn so let me add another 1d4+1 turdlings to the battle field and take 6 attacks with the gumbas currently out here”.

I don’t think “pernicious” would describe the NDAA, no.

I mean, some of them are vague to the point of being banal. The NDAA is just the bi-annual Congressional requirement to reauthorize US military operations abroad.

Why would anyone have that marked out as a conspiracy theory on the level of MK Ultra or Operation Northwoods? No reason you’d recognize the acronym as such.

Like the man himself or the whole assassination conspiracy theory thing?

Plenty of compelling evidence to believe Kennedy was murdered at the order of ex-CIA Director Allen Dulles. Even if you don’t want to go all the way down that rabbit hole, though, there’s even more evidence to suspect Kennedy’s secret service fucked up on the job - both in the planning of the parade and in the initial response to gunfire. The “magic bullet” thesis has a number of much more believable counter-explanations, not the least being Kennedy’s security detail firing blindly from inside the car and hitting the President by mistake.

Also, very deep CIA and mafia connections specifically running through New Orleans in the 1960s, such that letting Lee Harvey Oswald spill his guts would be bad for mission security, even if he had just been a lone gunman.

However you slice the Kennedy assassination, there’s plenty of big blind spots in the story where speculation runs rampant. And those blind spots are almost certainly the result of embarrassed/implicated state officials involved in some level of cover-up.

shit like MK Ultra actually and provably happened

The downwind implications of MK Ultra get incredibly muddy. It’s one thing to say “the US government was experimenting with psychedelics” and quite another to claim “The Manson Murders were orchestrated as a domestic terrorist event intended to crush the hippie movement in California and elect Ronald Reagan.”

You could say the same about the Gulf of Tonkin. Was this an American Navy vessel crew that fucked up by accident? Or a deliberate false flag intended to bring the US into Vietnam?

Bohemian Grove is another one you can take extremely deep. It gets brought up alongside Comet Ping Pong Pizza in the “elites are eating babies to stay young forever” conspiracies.

Part of the problem with this list is that you can take any item on it and flip it like a coin to get “mundane rational accusations of impropriety” on one side and “wildly speculative deep lore of a fascist puppeteer regime controlling the country” on the other.

This is the famous “Loo With A View” taken from a high end restaurant in Paris, incidentally.

Peak Shitpost. A++. Would expect to see it reposted again.

Putting on my D.A.R.E. T-shirt and clutching my state issued copy of the Ten Commandments and snapping an Amazon Ring Camera on my front door, so I help the state identify any of those nasty, America hating Antifa I’ve been hearing so much about.

I’m helping!

I can explain in basic terms what is happening there. Does that help anybody?

Really depends on where the bug lives.

I would argue that it doesn’t because almost everyone writes code in higher level languages.

Most people write mediocre code. A lot of people right shit code. One reason why a particular application or function runs faster than another is due to the compilation of the high level language into assembly. Understanding how higher level languages translate down into lower level logic helps to reveal points in the code that are inefficient.

Just from a Big-O notation level, knowing when you’ve moved yourself from an O(n log n) to a O(n²) complexity is critical to writing efficiently. Knowing when you’re running into caching issues and butting up against processing limits informs how you delegate system resources. This doesn’t even have to go all the way to programming, either. A classic problem in old Excel and Notepad was excess text impacting whether you could even open the files properly. Understanding the underlying limits of your system is fundamental to using it properly.

Similarly, I could explain to you how long division works but the next time you need to divide two numbers you’re still going to reach for a calculator instead of a pencil and paper.

Knowing how to do long division is useful in validating the results of a calculator. People mistype values all the time. And whether they take the result at face value or double-check their work hinges on their ability to intuit whether the result matches their expectations. When I thought I typed 4/5 into a calculator and get back 1.2, I know I made a mistake without having to know the true correct answer.

One of the cruelest tricks in the math exam playbook is to include mistyped solutions into the multiple choice options.

What then is the point of lamenting the loss of knowledge that no one uses directly?

It’s not lamenting the loss of knowledge, but the inability to independently validate truth.

Without an underlying understanding of a system, what you have isn’t a technology but a religion.

You’re better for it.

The majority of posters are indistinguishable from bots

You’re not missing anything. Reddit is the embodiment of Empty Internet Theory. If you’re a human posting on that site, you’re a statistical anomaly. And not for long, because everyone’s getting booted.

Well, like with the Netflix question, you can keep going deeper until you hit the unknown. At some point, the person asking the question doesn’t know the questions to ask to get to that next level, though.

Stupid cephalopods. Learn to breed without dying, idiots!

LintCoin’s value is through the roof, though. You’d be a fool not to hand them all your boring old American dollars.

And don’t even get me started on TulipCoin.

Idk if I’d call it a “strength”. Feels more like a weakness.

But sure. This is the reason bureaucracies exist. Knowledge accrual, organization of specialties, long term investment planning, and distribution of surplus… as critical today as it was 8,000 years ago.