Annoying Questions I'd Like Answered...

[hyzmarca]

Why couldn't America and Great Britain just forcibly annex most of Western Europe after World War II? It seems like it would have saved us this entire Eurozone headache.

[erik]

Why couldn't America and Great Britain just forcibly annex most of Western Europe after World War II? It seems like it would have saved us this entire Eurozone headache.

Yeah, because America is such a bastion of sanity and fiscal responsibility.

[Stahlseele]

Probably because the USSR would have wanted to have a say in that and it would have basically kept the war going, just with russia on the right side and the allies on the left side . .

[tussock]

They're democracies. The propaganda they chose during the war was to free the nations of the world from the yoke of foreign oppression. The post-war propaganda was based around not taking over said nations, and thus being better than the Communists.

Democracy is about holding back the revolution. You fuck with people's ideas about what government is, what it does, what it means, you can get revolutions in no time. Post-WWII, the winners couldn't afford people noticing they weren't much different to the Nazis.

Besides, the people of France did not greet the Americans as liberators. Annexation would not have been peaceful, as it was not in the east.

[Prak]

So, I'm inserting the events of Saints Row the Third into some game stuff I'm writing. At the end, the Saints annex a major city and declare it sovereign territory.

What would the actual fallout of an, essentially, paramilitary organization declaring a city to be sovereign territory be? Keep in mind, they already showed the ability to repel an actual government sponsored military organization, complete with it's own helicarrier.

Question two- What would the fallout of this same sort of action be in a typical psuedo-medieval (ancient-renaissance) fantasy world be?

[Ancient History]

"It depends." The main questions are whether the city is self-supporting, what agreements it has with neighboring communities, where the population flees to (if it can). In medieval times holding a hardpoint like, say, Malta or Jerusalem was dependent both on the fortifications and the ability to be resupplied; even if the paras can hold the city it becomes a question of how long they can hold it for a prolonged siege - and that's only the start of the problem, since the main advantage of such militaries is often their mobility rather than their numbers. Still, you can have a situation where a small, dedicated group that was insane and/or had superior technology could hold a position almost indefinitely.

In a lot of cultures (medieval Europe, Asia, &c.) organized warfare was basically designed explicitly to avoid certain legal questions like "Why can't I just march my guys over there and take that city? It looks cool!" because there's a tangleweb of legal and social concepts of who owns what and what that actually means. So if your guys become the Masters of Sin City, does that mean they need to pay off the debts that Sin City owes for the swanky canals that keep it watered? What about the trade agreements with neighboring Whoreville? The surrounding farming communities that send grain and corn-fed young prostitutes-in-training to sustain the city? All the people that live there and think they actually own their houses and shit, are you going to collect taxes? How?

Which didn't mean random groups of people didn't do exactly that, but it generally involved a cultural break of some kind. Alaric sacking Rome, for example, or the Vikings deciding they kinda liked Normandy and wanted to stay, maybe do a little farming, or the Mongols just taking over China. Often it involved a degree of syncretism - adopting some of the airs, titles, and duties of the local culture and marrying them or equating them with that of the invaders.

[name_here]

In the modern era, other people would probably try the same thing elsewhere, while the rest of the world would not acknowledge their legitimacy openly in order to avoid ticking off the nation they broke away from. Also, the national government would probably try to re-annex them and other nations would discreetly support them to undermine the original controller.

In the medieval era, there would be a new sovereign nation which the group they broke away from does not like and their neighbors have mixed opinions depending on how much they liked the original. Unless it was a proper democratic revolution, in which case every monarch who doesn't want to switch to a constitutional monarchy and the nobility would try to kill them before their oppressed peasantry got ideas. Basically they would become 1800's France.

[Prak]

Well, in the transposed version, it probably helps that the group which took over is part of same race of "true breeding psuedo-tieflings with the baggage boiled out" as their new citizens, and essentially plan to let business as usual continue, just... well, it's like if a bunch of Roman thugs fought off the legionaires who'd been killing bunches of Roman citizens and generally wrecking up Rome as part of their efforts to stop the thugs and then decided, after a legionaire plot killed the hear thug's friend and Caesar, to say "fuck it, we're in charge now, next legion I see gets killed with extreme prejudice." but then left the usual government structure in place and just assigned a new Caesar.

[name_here]

Pretty much exactly that scenario played out in actual Rome. There would probably be a series of fights between various powerful groups until one of them was ascendent and the power of the others had been decisively broken. This would seriously suck for the ordinary citizens of the area, so they'd happily back anyone who managed to end the fighting.

[Prak]

Well that's handy, awesome.

[Koumei]

This could go in "When entertainment lost you", but it's more a question/discussion thing, so whatever.

I was watching what I shall call "Post-Mortem of the nWo", by WWE, about how it started, how it became massive, how it put WCW in the lead, how it made pro wrestling cool enough to be a fan of, and how it then destroyed both itself and WCW... and how Vince rehashed it to squeeze a few pennies out (through nWo shirts).

So here are some angles that have happened in pro wrestling after the second time the nWo happened in WCW (that one was brief):

• New Bloods, aka "Fire Russo", aka "nWo 3.0: it worked the last two times!", aka "viagra-on-a-pole" (major)
• The WCW/ECW Alliance invade WWE (major)
• Right to Censor tries to take WWE over (minor)
• The nWo invades WWE (minor)
• Nexus/CORRE invades WWE (minor)
• pWo invades WEW (a joke more than anything else)
• The Band (see: we don't have the rights to the nWo name despite actually being the nWo) forms on TNA
• Main Event Mafia takes over TNA (major)
• The Shield tries to invade and completely change WWE (minor, ongoing)
• Aces & Eights invade TNA (major, ongoing)

See a pattern here? Anyway, it occurred to me. Is there anything left for them to actually do in wrestling?

WWE has been raking money in with the Cena/PG-13 era, but is shit, and anyone who was old enough to watch it in the Attitude era will tell you that. TNA puts itself as the more edgy, grown up one, because it has biker gangs and thumb tacks and blood (but still minimal coarse language and no boobs, that's just going too far). It's still basically the same shit over and again. WEW exists no longer, but when it did exist it was interspersed with porn, and was okay with boobs and stuff, but honestly the stories were the same as anywhere else. Shimmer is awesome, and they're incredibly skilled athletes, and half the time there's no ongoing feud, it's seriously "two skilled athletes compete to further their chances of a title match. They shake hands after the match".

But do the promotions just keep on repeating the nWo thing because it worked the first time and they're a broken record/the fans are too coked out to remember what happened a year ago/they're crazy, hence doing the same thing and hoping for different results?

Or is there just nowhere left for it to go? Has it already been all it's ever going to be, and the options are "put on those rose-tinted spectacles and talk about the good old days of the Ministry of Darkness", "stop watching this stuff and do something productive" or "pretend A&8 are a totally new interesting angle"?

Edit: indeed, imaginative people, were you running a promotion, what direction would you take it, to show there's still life in it?

[Prak]

So, I opened a word file I've been working on on a mac at school (or perhaps it was opening it on my phone) and now words that are at the end of a line and too long for the line, aren't just starting on a new line, they're getting split. What I mean is, say you've entered a line of text and at the end, before a new line starts, you start typing "great". What you get is "g
reat"


How the fuck do I fix this?

[fectin]

You may have all non-breaking spaces in there. Highlight a space, copy it, and do a find-replace pasting in that space and replacing it with a single spacebar press.

[tussock]

Re: Wrestling. It's a soap opera for boys. The plot there was the business world is cruel piracy because it's the 90's and we're only just catching up with that fact.

Their new plot would have to be ... I don't know, how about some wrestlers are gay and just want equal tag-team rights, but other wrestlers think that's icky and won't wrestle them, but the gay wrestlers end up siding with the flag-wearing USA! USA! dude to fight the immigrant communist Chinese tag-team powerhouse, who always have a French referee because they wrestle by weird international rules. First they beat up the ref, proving he's corrupt and finding clues to a world government terrorist plot, when the lights go off and a real terrorist pops out of the crowd and because the government has banned guns he's the only one with a gun and ....

Just try to offend everyone all at once. The terrorist should wear the wrong type of head scarf with the wrong pattern. Really wrong, Scottish or something. If there's a black guy, make sure he's the new boss, and everything is his fault. What could be more popular than being offensive and blaming the liberals for taking offense.

[Prak]

You may have all non-breaking spaces in there. Highlight a space, copy it, and do a find-replace pasting in that space and replacing it with a single spacebar press.

I fixed it, just copied it into google docs and then back over into a new word file.

[Cynic]

I was wondering if it's possible to use a 130 v bulb in a light fixture that previously held a 120 v bulb? Aside from the voltage, the bulbs have the same wattage, base, and size.

[hyzmarca]

I was wondering if it's possible to use a 130 v bulb in a light fixture that previously held a 120 v bulb? Aside from the voltage, the bulbs have the same wattage, base, and size.

There is no such thing as a 130 volt light socket. Marketing nonsense is nonsense. There is no practical difference.

bulbs that are labeled as 130 volt just have a thicker filament, which means that they run cooler and dimmer at the same wattage but last longer.

Personally, I recommend going florescent, instead.

[Maj]

Cynic... You changing an appliance light? the 130's fine.

---

I have never hated fluorescent lighting more than when I took two dead light bulbs out of my light fixture, and hid them on the top shelf of my kitchen cabinets... Only to find my very curious son had scaled the kitchen counters and gotten the bulbs out to "study." I spent the next few days hiding the bulbs from my son until I had time to make it to the special hazardous materials drop off. Any other light bulb I could have just thrown away.

I've been buying energy-efficient halogens to replace my fluorescents as they die. With the promised new wave of LED bulbs coming in with high lumens and lower pricing, I'll hopefully be able to start buying those with confidence instead.

[Cynic]

Actually, these are 130 v halogens but I seem to have the problem resolved. Well, I'll know when the bulb comes in.

Maj: My landlord loves installing some esoteric light fixtures inside the house that use way too powerful bulbs within the home. My kitchen light uses an R7 1000W halogen. It's dimmable but even at the medium dim setting, it always seems like my vision's getting white washed. Apparently the landlord/friend has some sort of attachment to that fixture so he'd rather I not change it for something else. So I just went on the hunt for a lower wattage bulb finally.

[...You Lost Me]

This might not be the best place to ask, but...

I've been told by lots of people (mostly engineers) that neurons are entirely 1's and 0's--they go displaying to non-displaying, and that's it. Other people have told me that neurons can have a variety of different signals.

Given the way neurons transport their charge, how is it possible that neurons have anything other than boolean activity states?

[Kaelik]

This might not be the best place to ask, but...

I've been told by lots of people (mostly engineers) that neurons are entirely 1's and 0's--they go displaying to non-displaying, and that's it. Other people have told me that neurons can have a variety of different signals.

Given the way neurons transport their charge, how is it possible that neurons have anything other than boolean activity states?

It might be possible that an individual neuron has 3-4 branches (or eight thousand, I don't know) and that some of those branches have more resistance than others, so a charge that goes through the neuron might turn on two neurons that touch it, but not two others.

So... If you think of the neuron as a boolean gate, each individual neuron could effectively operate as more complex series of gates by passing the current on to some but not all of their branches.

[...You Lost Me]

My knowledge is that the way charge moves through a neuron is by activating voltage-gated sodium channels which pump a bunch of sodium in, and then because there's so much charge they activate the sodium channels adjacent to themselves (they have a delay time in closing so that charges don't get bounced back and forth).

To me, that means that if a neuron gets activated in one place, the activation will spur activity everywhere, which is why it seems like an all-or-nothing reaction.

[Ted the Flayer]

I need some legal advice.

A gas station ripped me off, they threw a $125 fee on top of my gas purchase, and it sent me into the red (and since I got gas and a snack, I had to pay an overdraft fee TWICE on top of that!)

It was made on a debit card, and I know that makes it more difficult to dispute, but I still want to. I sent a message to my bank through the online service (and will call them directly when the open tomorrow morning), but what else can I do? I want to stay 100% legal, but I also want to rain hell on this fucking place for stealing from me.

[DSMatticus]

Neuron output is binary, neuron input is binary, and a neuron's internal state is an integer in the range of (NUM_INHIBITING_CONNECTIONS, NUM_EXCITING_CONNECTIONS), though if the internal state actually approaches either of those bounds odds are you are either having a megaseizure or your brain has been hooked up directly to a bunch of car batteries. Either way, you are having a very bad time. Functionally, neurons are a threshold function with an array of (weighted) binary inputs and a single binary output.


The neuron body (that thing on the left) receives a lot of binary inputs through its synapses (does this receptor have a neurotransmitter in it, yes/no?), and depending on which synapse that is it either excites or inhibits the electrical activity in the neuron. Once the neuron is excited enough, channels at the start of the axon (that long tube coming off the neuron body) opens and that causes a domino affect all the way down. But whether or not a channel is open or not is totally binary, and therefore the extent of the neuron's agitation cannot be carried to the axon terminals (those things on the right), which are the outgoing connection to other neurons.

tl;dr that thing you said, but with more words and a picture.

P.S. there are exceptions to basically everything in this post because fuck you, that's why. Some synapses are direct electrical connections (potentially non-binary), and some axon terminals directly output electrical signals of varying strength (absolutely non-binary).

[erik]

I need some legal advice.

A gas station ripped me off, they threw a $125 fee on top of my gas purchase, and it sent me into the red (and since I got gas and a snack, I had to pay an overdraft fee TWICE on top of that!)

It was made on a debit card, and I know that makes it more difficult to dispute, but I still want to. I sent a message to my bank through the online service (and will call them directly when the open tomorrow morning), but what else can I do? I want to stay 100% legal, but I also want to rain hell on this fucking place for stealing from me.

Raining hell down on the gas station won't be terribly productive. I have no idea why they'd tack on such an enormous fee, but it probably wasn't an error on the part of anyone in the station nor intentional malice. Best is to try and fix the fuck-up in a situation which results in the best outcome for you, and probably avoid that gas station/chain in the future if possible.

When you call the bank see if they can drop the overdraft charges in addition to disputing the 125 fee. If you have a good history with the bank then they might drop em once. Calling in the morning is often your best bet since many customer service call centers have different rules depending upon when you call. Many gauge customer satisfaction by giving surveys and after they get their survey for the day (usually early in their shift) then they are only incentivized to cut their call times down and not transfer the call, so they aren't as willing to give credits as they are in the mornings when they gotta get a good survey.

When I had my crummy stint doing customer service for Verizon I was authorized to give crap like $200 credit to reverse the damaged phone fee since it was obviously broken outside of warranty (returned mangled and shattered... yet the return shipping box was miraculously in mint condition), all so I could get a good survey (the entire call center is measured by the metric of good surveys, not just the rep on the phone). I actually didn't want to give that credit but my supe insisted.

So yeah, call the number on your card, dispute the charge, try and get the overdraft charges dropped too.