The Gaming Den

I think customers are some of the worst kinds of human beings. They are filth.

I know I should be able to dispute that, but yeah, there's truth there.

Does anyone know why the hell I can't get my 1099-r form? I've requested it be sent multiple times, they have my correct address on file but they won't send it to me.

I think I know the answer to this (shit in one hand and wish in the other), but is there any governing body I can complain to?

Are you sure you're due a 1099-R?

I took a withdrawal from a 401k last year. Yes, I'm due one.

First option: Call the IRS about it. 800-829-1040 Be prepared for painfully painful hold times, because we've spent the last 20 years gutting the parts of the IRS that help people follow the law and catch the crooks who willfully break it.

Second option: if you know the amount withdrawn, the type of withdrawal and how much tax was withheld, just report that info on form 4852 https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f4852.pdf and then your 1040.

Third option: request an extension, giving you an additional 6 months to get the form and to file your taxes -- although any interest and penalties do begin to accrue on April 15th. (and if you took a 401k withdrawal, you are probably gonna owe - that's not just a 10% penalty, the withdrawal also counts as ordinary income for tax purposes -- meaning it's taxed at your marginal rate).

Why do customers call, leave a 2-5 minute message where they slowly say who they are, who they work for, and half of an idea about what they want, then suddenly speed through their phone number so you can't make out more than half of it?

I'd understand if people had different ways of fucking up a complicated process like saying words into a phone, but all of the bastards fuck it up exactly the same way. Is there a class on how to leave a terrible message or something? A contest? Is that why they yell into their phones with the ear piece as far away from them as possible?

Because for them, the number is a routine bit of information that they're practiced at saying, whereas leaving the rest of the message involves much more thinking and self-second-guessing.

Personally, I repeat my number 2-3 times, slowly, because I've worked customer service and remember how annoying that habit was!

I've had to go through several painful re-listenings of similar messages for the same reason. I suppose some introspection is in order, and I will change how I start leaving messages in the future.

"Hi, this is Rob ___. I have a question about ____. You can reach me at ___. So, my question was <insert rambly stuff here>"

There. Now I'm free to ramble like an idiot, and the person has my number within the first ten seconds.

You should also end with your phone number. Twice.

That way they don't have to listen to the whole message to get it if they missed it.

Worldbuilding question: How long will a post-post-apocalyptic space colony remain in the schizo tech stage? The basic history here is:

-Automated probe finds planet suitable for terraforming, cannibalizes some asteroids for materials to produce machinery to get things rolling and notifies home that this planet's ready for a generation ship.

-Generation ship arrives, uses pre-existing asteroid mining and colony infrastructure brought with them to set up a colony, completes terraforming process after a few generations, technology is highly advanced with nano factories being commonplace, but there's plenty of natural resources left and the population hasn't nearly filled up the globe, leaving lots of wilderness between cities.

-Oh, no! Space apocalypse! A terrible war throughout the galaxy extends to this world. Different cities take sides. Nukes are launched. Civilization ends. The rest of the galaxy seems to be at least mostly in similar straits, because no one answers distress calls asking for outside help to rebuild.

-A new civilization emerges to reclaim the ruins of the old. There are lots of Precursor nano factories that survived the conflict, but they're mostly small. The nanobots produced by the factories can't make more nanobots and also can't make anything outside the nano forge, due to a combination of intentional anti-grey goo measures and technobabble tech limitations on what nanobots can do. You can drop garbage into a nano factory and it can recycle that into anything from a large but pre-selected menu of items with limited customization. Most surviving nano factories are civilian grade, which means there's a lot of limits on the items it can produce to prevent weapons, military-grade vehicles, and fuel (civilian vehicles are purely electric and don't last longer than a day or two out of contact with the power grid - vehicles that can go longer without refueling are pretty strictly the domain of military and search and rescue vehicles). There are no surviving nano factories above a certain size, which means things like aircraft carriers, space shuttles, and airplanes can't be produced.

-No information on advanced technology has disseminated following the apocalypse due to the rise of a vaguely Adeptus Mechanicus-esque techno-supremacist faction who have actively sought to secure as much information on technology as they can and keep it away from everyone else, out of the reasoning that 1) technological proliferation to the masses caused the apocalypse and therefore only a select elite can be allowed to have technology or this will happen again, and as time wears on 2) the machine spirits will get angry and rebel against people who don't know how to placate them, and also 3) we like being the only ones who can make new tanks. They intentionally capture or, if unable to capture, destroy servers and larger, rarer nano factories to keep them out of the hands of anyone but themselves. Individual experts in a future tech hyper-specialized society are useless to recovering technology on their own, so whoever controls the servers where Wikipedia is stored controls all technology. Because the not!Mechanicus are overly reverent of Precursor technology and do not brook improvement upon it, they can only ever retain the servers they have or lose them to corruption, decay, or war, never advancing or spreading technology. And they have pretty much all the servers to themselves.

There's still tons of working Precursor tech lying around, though, including lots of furniture size nano factories that can produce consumer electronics and small kitchen appliances. Most Precursors had one of these in their house, and even though they're way more rare after the apocalypse, they're still common enough that there's no way the not!Mechanicus could hope to capture or destroy even a large fraction of them, let alone all of them. Even slightly larger factories that can produce electric cars are common enough to be out of reach of the not!Mechanicus. The Wikipedia app loaded by default on your iPad doesn't work because the not!Mechanicus captured or destroyed all the servers, but it's not a big deal to have the iPad.

How long does it take people to figure out how to reinvent tech without access to written instructions, but with working examples in unlimited quantities?

My assumption is that society's dependence on Precursor nano-factories capable of doing way better than any locally produced tech advances could hope to compete with will be a huge impediment to research and drastically slow the rate at which technology is reinvented even in societies outside the not!Mechanicus' sphere of influence and who are perfectly willing to let people invent as many computers as they want. No one wants to bother inventing the Model T because we have working Precursor electric cars with engines so miniaturized that no one has any idea how to replicate them except by printing more from a nano factory. Similarly, society can face unprecedented tech loss due to the dependence on institutions and technology to preserve knowledge. The last time we had an apocalypse and ensuing dark age, preserving technology was mainly the job for whatever craftsman used it, and for the most part they could just keep doing that. Worst case scenario, even techs like aqueducts which required society-spanning cooperation to produce weren't lost because the concept is so damn obvious once you already know about it. I can tell you 80% of how to build an aqueduct because I've seen pictures of one, but the only thing I know about building an iPhone is that evidently it is possible.

So, society is clustered around the surviving fusion reactors, irreplaceable, capable of producing obscene amounts of energy, but requiring you to install new connections to expand the energy grid. You can't go to a new location and start a whole new city by importing energy until you can build a new fusion reactor. You have to connect the new grid to the old one, and if that connection is severed, the new grid goes completely dead. Outside of the grid, all tech becomes useless as soon as the batteries run out.

Does that work, and how long would that state of affairs last?

The relative fragility of modern society is a question of much debate at the moment. It's superficially obvious that electronic media can't even be read without an appropriate functioning machine and that most of the devices we work with in our daily lives require specific advanced tools to make even if you could access the instructions to do so without advanced tools, which you can't.

On the flip side, The Soviet Union went from horse drawn carts to winning the space race in a single generation. All of modern medicine from the Germ Theory of Disease to using fMRI to map the brain has taken place in the last 155 years. We know that you can build advanced society from tools you make in a blacksmith's shed in less than two centuries, because we did that.

So my guess is that Mad Max Tech stages, where pre-fall tech was around but people also used swords or some shit because they couldn't make new high tech devices would only last a couple of generations. Colossus was built 64 years before the first iPhone was sold, and it would presumably go faster if people had actual iPhones to dissect for design ideas.

-Username17

I agree that recovering lost tech probably wouldn't take longer than 50-100 years-ish if people are motivated. My question is, could people plausibly just not bother to reinvent lost technologies in this scenario? The ultimate goal is to have nano factories be the only source of technology for several centuries, even for the good guys who are making no efforts to suppress reclamation of technology at all. That requires some impediment to the tech progression, and the idea I'm double checking is whether having ready access to iPads and refrigerators would be sufficient to drastically slow people from figuring out how to make iPads and refrigerators without fabricating them with nano factories.

Like, a major part of the impetus of making the Model T is that it was better than a horse-drawn carriage. If you invent the Model T in patchwork tech land, that's great and all, but civilians already have way better cars and the military doesn't care until you bring them something that extends the effective range of their vehicles, and the Model T's even worse than an electric pickup in terms of how far you can take it into the wilderness before you need to turn back. If no one's excited about telegrams, can that plausibly delay the development of communications tech so that it develops slower the second time compared to the first? Or is it implausible for that to outweigh having working examples to work from? How much is technological progress tied to the fact that technology is useful and how much is tied to the fact that a certain kind of person just likes to solve problems, and doesn't care so much whether anyone will actually use the Model T they're making from scratch?

A potential issue here is that the megacorporations making all of our technology are specifically proofing against that. Apple spends a crapton of time making sure you don't reverse engineer or even repair iPhones without using Apple's proprietary technology wielded by Apple's proprietary technicians. It's the trade guild mystery cult taken up to eleven. So I think that Adeptus Mechanicus style guilds each holding their own chunk of secret knowledge are a probable scenario for the post-apocalypse. The Adeptus Aplus know how to fix and charge iPhones and Ordo Novo Nordisk fields insulin conjurers, and the two do not share.

The point about building modern civilization from a blacksmith's shed is illustrative in both directions - 'cause the blacksmiths had sheds for thousands of years before they could be assed to forge us any iPhones.

The development of modern civilization probably isn't about figuring out how to make a toaster and then working your way up to spaceships over the next couple decades because physics is secretly super easy. Hero of Alexandria knew how to use a windmill to drive a pump and could never be assed to figure out anything to do with it beyond feed air into a musical instrument and impress his friends.

It is probably about a series of incredibly complicated economic and cultural shifts. In that sense, you would expect modern civilization to be remarkably durable. It's not the things we know, it's the way we think, and we've been beating that into you since the day you were born, and you'll beat it into your children whether you want to or not, and some of them will go out and make shit. It's not a torch we can stumble and drop, it's a part of who we are - but it's not immutable. It can go out. We changed to be like this; given the right circumstances and enough time we can change to stop being like this. If the hard times are long and harrowing enough to make whatever ineffable cultural qualities that make us this way exotic luxuries, then the survivors may very well stumble through a thousand years worth of Hero of Alexandria's before it occurs to anyone to be clever for anything other than the sake of being clever.

You'd also have to assume all of the electrical engineers and physicists and others who were developing the science at the time were gone. In Fallout it works, because there have been several generations since the end, and also all of the good scientists were taken to be part of the secret government project. In Battletech, it's because the scientists are always captured or killed before they can finish anything.

Longes' idea of everything being secret and silo-ed could work with that. You have someone who knows about phones, but they can only develop screens, and the person who knows about transmitters won't work because they're part of a back to nature cult now or whatever.

The fact is that if nano-assemblers exist then the only technology that matters is getting access to an unlocked nano-assembler. It's like the joke of pirating 3D printers by printing more 3D printers, only real. Even if a nano-assembler can't make more nanobots, an unlocked assembler can make all the parts for the machine that does make nanobots. At which point you can just start churning out unlocked assemblers and the not!mechanus priesthood can go pound sand.

Even if the assemblers themselves were absolutely tamper proof, the goal would still not be to rebuild society from the from stone->bronze->iron->gunpowder->steam->etc. You'd just have people ripping apart iPads and toasters for the parts they need to make nanobots.

The thing stopping an industrial age society from making nanobots is not principally that they lack parts. It's that nanobots are small and the nano factories' pre-existing item menus have no reason to produce tools that can assemble nanobots, and indeed specifically do not have tools that can produce nanobots as an anti-grey goo measure. If we get knocked down the tech tree, we will probably be able to use leftover technology to get back up the tree quickly, but you cannot give an iPad to a watermill factory and expect them to be able to immediately produce circuit boards with a squillion transistors just because they've got working examples, let alone nanobots. Their tools are too crude to reproduce the nanobots even if they know exactly how they work. This does mean that the pinnacle of the tech tree is the point when we have tools sufficiently precise to make a nanobot, without requiring us to rediscover actual nanobots, because at that point we can just copy the nanobots we already have lying around, but that's actually more convenient for me, because it means I can go ahead and have as inexplicably vast a gap as I like between modern day tech and Precursor tech, and can have team good guy cross that gap towards the story's end without having to explain any of the intermittent steps between "can make an iPhone" and "can make a matter reassembler."

Of course, the thing that I so far just have to quietly hope no one notices is that any nano factory of any size immediately breaks the setting if anyone ever figured out how to jailbreak one, something which delivers an immediate and very beneficial upgrade and which you would therefore expect people to pursue. My current hand wave is that you can't reprogram a nano factory without using nano bots on the outside of the chamber in the middle where things actually get produced, and the nanobots cannot leave that chamber because [technobabble]. Thus, people are required to go up the tech tree in order to jailbreak the nano factories. That's not a great explanation, but I'm not scrapping the entire patchwork tech premise because some of the supporting science falls apart at the edges, so fundamental flaws with the technobabble handwaves on the limitations of future tech aren't really important unless there's more airtight solutions that accomplish the same thing. If I tell an audience that we have nano factories but can't get them to make anything that isn't on this pre-selected list they come programmed with, they're either willing to accept that as necessary to the premise of people armed primarily with swords driving dune buggies around or they're not in my audience.

A fundamental flaw in the motivation and time span of a race back up the tech tree by people who've redeveloped enlightenment values and are trying to break the not!Mechanicus' grip on the world matters a lot more, because that's the actual story that I'm telling. I can tell my audience "look, we all know this story was never going to contain instructions for the creation of a working matter reassembler, so just assume this unknown tech has certain limitations and move on," but I can't tell my audience "just ignore the fact that my story about the triumph of enlightenment thinking over dark age repression fundamentally misunderstands the effects of enlightenment thinking on society."

Chamomile wrote:If we get knocked down the tech tree, we will probably be able to use leftover technology to get back up the tree quickly, but you cannot give an iPad to a watermill factory and expect them to be able to immediately produce circuit boards with a squillion transistors just because they've got working examples, let alone nanobots. Their tools are too crude to reproduce the nanobots even if they know exactly how they work.

My point is that nobody is going to be working in a watermill factory ever if there are people alive who know DRM is the only reason their kitchen fabber can't make rifles and medicine. The techpriests can jack off to having millspec fabbers in their fortresses as much as they want, but as long as there's a nonzero fraction of people who read a freshman engineering textbook and know that free use of nanobots is just a bootstrap problem and not magic then the entirety of society will just be in a "it's still the modern age, we're just rationing resources" mindset, not "Welp, I guess it's medieval times with iPads now". Everyone with a soldering iron will be working on the problem of how to use cm-scale tools that come out of civilian fabbers to make micron-scale tools to make 100 nm-scale tools to make 10 nm-scale tools to make a nanobot reactor, or a grip of crude nanobots that can finally jailbreak the civilian fabber.

If you want a society of patchwork technology that basically ends up being "Lord of the Rings with iPads" that's totally doable, but you need to extend the timescale to multiple thousands of years. If would also help if the fabbers were semi-mystical. Like Zardoz heads that float around dispensing iPads and electric scooters, but electrocute anyone who tries to touch them.

Your current presentation of the problem just doesn't have enough time for people to forget the information you're asking them to reinvent. It's like asking "If OPEC started an oil embargo, how long would it take for my kids to reinvent gasoline?" That's simply not the problem anyone alive will be trying to solve.

EightWave wrote:If you want a society of patchwork technology that basically ends up being "Lord of the Rings with iPads" that's totally doable, but you need to extend the timescale to multiple thousands of years.

What about a yawning abyss of a social divide? Lots of fancy toys around nowdays, lots of people don't get to play with them for social and economic reasons.

now where have i hear a setting with magic and high tech and a yawning abyss of a social divide before . .

Stahlseele wrote:now where have i hear a setting with magic and high tech and a yawning abyss of a social divide before . .

Almost every Sci-Fantasy setting that isn't Star Trek (which pretends not to be Sci-Fantasy)?

I'm guessing you mean 40k, but you could as easily mean Star Wars, or Dune or...

EightWave wrote:Everyone with a soldering iron will be working on the problem of how to use cm-scale tools that come out of civilian fabbers to make micron-scale tools to make 100 nm-scale tools to make 10 nm-scale tools to make a nanobot reactor, or a grip of crude nanobots that can finally jailbreak the civilian fabber.

This is a good point, but even ignoring the problem that something has to happen to cause people to forget that the nano factories are technology and not magic (50-100 years of continuous calamity would probably be sufficient, although that isn't going to result from a single nuclear war, so I have to figure out how that's happening), it causes a problem where the society that redevelops enlightenment thinking and begins looking at the nano factories as a technology problem does not then make any visible tech progression until the very end when they get working nanobots and hit their win state. A secret tool miniaturization project reaching fruition and then like six weeks later all the nano factories are unlocked, self-replicating, and giving the good guys unlimited industrial output is in a bad spot of being too sudden and decisive an advantage to serve as a final battle but not sudden and decisive enough to be a MacGuffin whose activation immediately wins the final battle.

Thaluikhain wrote:

EightWave wrote:If you want a society of patchwork technology that basically ends up being "Lord of the Rings with iPads" that's totally doable, but you need to extend the timescale to multiple thousands of years.

What about a yawning abyss of a social divide? Lots of fancy toys around nowdays, lots of people don't get to play with them for social and economic reasons.

Lord of Light is the perfect source material. In Lord of Light a colony ship crashlanded and the crew hoarded technology and instituted a theocratic regime with them as hindu gods.

Chamomile wrote:
This is a good point, but even ignoring the problem that something has to happen to cause people to forget that the nano factories are technology and not magic (50-100 years of continuous calamity would probably be sufficient, although that isn't going to result from a single nuclear war, so I have to figure out how that's happening),

One side was planning on releasing a biological weapon and in fact, did. It was so virulent that a nuclear attack was launched on the country that had the initial contamination with the intention of preventing the spread. What they didn't know was that the engineered disease does have a 'self-destruct timer' - the side that launched it intended to claim the territory as soon as it was safe. In the destruction that followed, there are a number of vials of the disease that have been found and opened; each time resulting in the extinction of a band of survivors. The duration of the disease is short enough that it hasn't spread globally due in part to the lack of reliable connections between survivor groups.