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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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DragonParadox said:
Wait some manner of expert (several of them from the look of things) actually concluded that the more you farm a place the more it's going to rain? By what mechanism? Human sweat seeding the atmosphere? :confused:
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Basically people at the time mistook correlation for causation, some people started trying to farm in arid areas, by coincidence there was an increase in rainfall in those areas after they started farming, and people thought that farming automatically caused rainfall. We now know the principle isn't complete bullshit, transpiration of water from vegetation can cause local changes in climate such as increases in humidity and precipitation but the effects are minor and come at the expense of rainfall in the areas surrounding it, meaning if everywhere has people planting crops trying to increase rainfall in their area there's no net change in rainfall for anyone. Once climatological fluctuations swung the other way and rainfall decreased the Dust Bowl happened and lots of people's livelihoods were ruined.
 
Mystic Pentagram said:
That feels like it kind of defeats the purpose of free land.

If you dont have the money to buy land, you dont have the money to build an house.

And building an house from the ground up is probably way more expensive than buying some land (not that i know for certain, i never had to pay to build an house from zero, but it seems logical to me).
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I'm not saying it is the smartest or the most well thought out plan, but it is what some counties went with.
Also the land is kinda out of the way, meaning just living there has extra costs.

Which leads to my current issues with our government insisting i should live somewhere cheaper (because living cost subsidies), but there literally are no cheaper appartments available in areas where i would not have to pay more for transportation than i would save from rent (not to mention moving costs themselves).

Sometimes plans just don't work, because the people making the plans are idiots.
 
DragonParadox said:
Wait some manner of expert (several of them from the look of things) actually concluded that the more you farm a place the more it's going to rain? By what mechanism? Human sweat seeding the atmosphere? :confused:
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The Idea, according to Wikipedia:
Wikipedia said:
"Suppose (an army of frontier farmers) 50 miles, in width, from Manitoba to Texas, could acting in concert, turn over the prairie sod, and after deep plowing and receiving the rain and moisture, present a new surface of green growing crops instead of dry, hard-baked earth covered with sparse buffalo grass. No one can question or doubt the inevitable effect of this cooling condensing surface upon the moisture in the atmosphere as it moves over by the Western winds. A reduction of temperature must at once occur, accompanied by the usual phenomena of showers. The chief agency in this transformation is agriculture. To be more concise. Rain follows the plow."
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Andres said:
I think something I'm disappointed we'll never get to see is the rise of Sleek Sharpwit. He was a right bastard but he was cool and contemplative. Still, I'm quite happy that we got Qrech, who's very different to Sleek but fills the same role in the sense of a skaven contemplating their society.
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What I'm disappointed about is the death of Skarsnik. A goblin smart enough to rule orcs without needing the physical boosts of Grom is awesome.
 
Valmond said:
I'm not saying it is the smartest or the most well thought out plan, but it is what some counties went with.
Also the land is kinda out of the way, meaning just living there has extra costs.

Which leads to my current issues with our government insisting i should live somewhere cheaper (because living cost subsidies), but there literally are no cheaper appartments available in areas where i would not have to pay more for transportation than i would save from rent (not to mention moving costs themselves).

Sometimes plans just don't work, because the people making the plans are idiots.
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Moving far outside of existing cities could work to reduce living costs for some people like people who can work from home such as programmers and the like if you can get a decent internet connection and even if you can't some professions like authors and non-digital artists can work from home without an internet connection. Of course there's the massive upfront cost of building a house and all the associated infrastructure needed to make it habitable, depending on how far you are from civilization you might need to collect rainwater for water, use solar panels for electricity, and store garbage in dumpsters and blackwater in septic tanks until someone can periodically come to remove it. Unless living in the city is stupidly expensive and you have enough savings to make the massive investment needed in the first place it generally isn't worth it, it's usually easier and cheaper in the short-term to move to the suburbs of some city even if in the long-term you might save money by moving somewhere remote. There's a reason Homestead acts aren't really a thing anymore in most countries.
 
Mystic Pentagram said:
That feels like it kind of defeats the purpose of free land.

If you dont have the money to buy land, you dont have the money to build an house.

And building an house from the ground up is probably way more expensive than buying some land (not that i know for certain, i never had to pay to build an house from zero, but it seems logical to me).
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I mean, people did just go out in the wilderness and build a log cabin just from what was available in the area. It's entirely possible to replace money with incredible amounts of work.
 
Mystic Pentagram said:
If you dont have the money to buy land, you dont have the money to build an house.
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I know this might seem very weird to you but you do not actually need money to build a house. You give me a clay pit, free woods, and maybe some limestone, and as long as i have the tools and couple family members to help me out i can slap together a decent house. If it doesn't matter its log house then really just the free woods. (Which really all the better, i can fire a brick, but i only know the theory for the most basic bitch cement, never tried in practice).

Like even nowadays lot of rural eastern europe building is mostly just property cost and then material costs as you invite extended family to help out and the major cost (hiring workers) stops existing. If i didn't have to pay for property, i could bankroll a family house with what i have on my account whereas if i have to buy property its gonna take me another 10 years minimum. Pretty big difference, innit?
 
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NexusEye said:
And lots of people who commit suicide don't want to die, they just don't want to keep on living anymore. When someone is suicidal their self-preservation instinct doesn't vanish, it's screaming at them to stop while they're preparing to commit the suicidal act, it's just overridden by the part of their mind that doesn't want to live through another day of misery. As David Foster Wallace put it in his book the Infinite Jest better than I ever could:
"The so-called 'psychotically depressed' person who tries to kill herself doesn't do so out of quote 'hopelessness' or any abstract conviction that life's assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire's flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It's not desiring the fall; it's terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling 'Don't!' and 'Hang on!', can understand the jump. Not really. You'd have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling."
If a person possessing a desire to not die while carrying out an act which will kill themselves disqualifies that act from being called suicide then almost every time in history a person has ever intentionally killed themselves was not a suicide.
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While I completely agree and sympathize with that point, words do have a colloquial meaning people use and understand, lest they fall into "all actions are selfish" trap which may be semantically correct as a statement but wrong by any realistic human's use of that word.

However, I do understand and accept the fact that definitions should be strict and exact in both a scientific environment and the internet, so I'll try to be more precise. I think that while everything can be called a means to the end result of "and then I will be happier/less sad/won't suffer that much" but making this the end objective of any discussion is meaningless. It ignores the fact that such is shaped by us and the life that has shaped us.

As such, I believe such should be excluded from any means and objective chain, because it is useless as it is everyone's objective, and instead what people should understand as objective is "the means for one to directly achieve fulfillment or minimize their suffering". If something is the final step one can reach or think of reaching before reaching such an objective, I believe it is synonymous to the objective as it informs the person's priorities.

Note: My arguments are semantic, not moral. Discussing the morality of suicide and even self sacrifice is not something this thread is appropriate for. That's not to say I do not have an opinion, just that I believe it would be a derail.
 
Mystic Pentagram said:
That is one of the dumbest things i have ever read.

Was the guy a flat-earther too by any chance? Because that is the level of ignorance we are dealing with here.
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It makes a lot more sense when you realize there was a considerable religious element to a lot of the rhetoric. Not logical sense but the 'oh, so that's why they were being so stupid' sense.
pucflek said:
I know this might seem very weird to you but you do not actually need money to build a house. You give me a clay pit, free woods, and maybe some limestone, and as long as i have the tools and couple family members to help me out i can slap together a decent house.
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Unless you're the Primitive Technology guy I doubt it, virtually no one has the skills to build a house from complete scratch anymore, even construction workers would need artificial materials like concrete and such to build a proper house by themselves.
 
The amount of work, and technology, that goes into making basic hammer, is kinda nuts.
Trying to solo build almost anything is, way beyond what most people are capable of, and not worth the effort.
 
NexusEye said:
It makes a lot more sense when you realize there was a considerable religious element to a lot of the rhetoric. Not logical sense but the 'oh, so that's why they were being so stupid' sense.

Unless you're the Primitive Technology guy I doubt it, virtually no one has the skills to build a house from complete scratch anymore, even construction workers would need artificial materials like concrete and such to build a proper house by themselves.
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I mean, i won't make a glass window, and i won't make you porcelain toilet and without someone providing the piping and wires i can't electrify and plumb it either. but making a stone foundation, making proper mudbrick and carpentry are really not that difficult if you are not in some great rush. We are not talking, two storey 21st century house here.

(I also specified that i would, in fact, need tools. Making any kind of steel [or metal in general really] and shaping it is way beyond me).
 
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Also, a decent pre built home can be cheaper (200 k€) than the land it sits on, even in low population towns (20k people) here. All a question of land prices vs local earning potential.
 
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Honestly, we were thinning down one of the walls that dad left in the most recent whole-house reconstruction, which probably makes it three or so centuries old? And it was literally just properly stacked sandstone with local clay used in lieau of mortar. I could't make that because i can't properly shape stone, but masonry and carpentry aren't really that uncommon as skills if you go back only just fifty years, so an extended family moving into free land and just wholeass building a house for almost free when they aren't subsistence farming and hunting is really not stretching my belief at all.
 
NexusEye said:
Unless you're the Primitive Technology guy I doubt it, virtually no one has the skills to build a house from complete scratch anymore, even construction workers would need artificial materials like concrete and such to build a proper house by themselves.
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If I'm not wrong, we're talking of that in the context of elves doing that on Ulthuan. Building a medieval house with just a few family members is much easier than building a modern house.
 
I would imagine high elves have a lot of time to pick up skills and potentially magic to make them going out in the woods with nothing but their bare hands and ending with a splendid house in the middle of nowhere more viable than a human, too. Ulthuan homesteaders are probably on a whole other level.
 
For homesteading purposes a shitty house that's going to fall down within a year but still provides you shelter to build a second house with the lessons learned from the first house still counts as A House.

Wiggy said:
I would imagine high elves have a lot of time to pick up skills and potentially magic to make them going out in the woods with nothing but their bare hands and ending with a splendid house in the middle of nowhere more viable than a human, too. Ulthuan homesteaders are probably on a whole other level.
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Almost certainly without their bare hands anyway. People aren't homesteading by surprise, they're usually thinking "I could probably homestead" and then saving up money for basic tools before they actually go out into the woods.
 
Wiggy said:
I would imagine high elves have a lot of time to pick up skills and potentially magic to make them going out in the woods with nothing but their bare hands and ending with a splendid house in the middle of nowhere more viable than a human, too. Ulthuan homesteaders are probably on a whole other level.
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Its probably lot easier to find good healthy wood or the best clay for bricks or some shit. They've got uniform windsight right? There's bound to be shitton of that kind of wisdom in the rural population of Ulthuan.

Also what Reign said, they would have the tools at least.
 
Mystic Pentagram said:
That feels like it kind of defeats the purpose of free land.

If you dont have the money to buy land, you dont have the money to build an house.

And building an house from the ground up is probably way more expensive than buying some land (not that i know for certain, i never had to pay to build an house from zero, but it seems logical to me).
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What's better, having to pay for both land and a house or just for the house? Even if someone could pay for the former they may well still prefer the latter. Not to mention that in an agricultural society land is in and out of itself a source of income if you have the labor to work it.
 
storryeater said:
While I completely agree and sympathize with that point, words do have a colloquial meaning people use and understand, lest they fall into "all actions are selfish" trap which may be semantically correct as a statement but wrong by any realistic human's use of that word.

However, I do understand and accept the fact that definitions should be strict and exact in both a scientific environment and the internet, so I'll try to be more precise. I think that while everything can be called a means to the end result of "and then I will be happier/less sad/won't suffer that much" but making this the end objective of any discussion is meaningless. It ignores the fact that such is shaped by us and the life that has shaped us.

As such, I believe such should be excluded from any means and objective chain, because it is useless as it is everyone's objective, and instead what people should understand as objective is "the means for one to directly achieve fulfillment or minimize their suffering". If something is the final step one can reach or think of reaching before reaching such an objective, I believe it is synonymous to the objective as it informs the person's priorities.

Note: My arguments are semantic, not moral. Discussing the morality of suicide and even self sacrifice is not something this thread is appropriate for. That's not to say I do not have an opinion, just that I believe it would be a derail.
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If we're talking semantics suicide has a fairly concrete definition, the killing of oneself, killing yourself because you're depressed is suicide, killing yourself to help others is altruistic suicide, by some looser definitions that don't include intentionality as being necessary for suicide you could argue things like Darwin Award winning acts are negligent suicide in that they would have qualified for negligent homicide if the person being killed was someone else. Self-sacrifice that involves one's own intentional death is still suicide albeit altruistic suicide, it's arguably the greatest form of self-sacrifice one can achieve barring exotic circumstances involving fates worse than death that generally only occur in fiction such as Caledor Dragontamer's sacrificing of his life one day at a time over thousands of years.
 
Early homesteaders in the American West actually built their houses out of sod—the top layer of soil. They were digging it up anyway so they could plow the land and plant crops, so they just added a step and cut the sod into large "bricks".

It wasn't pleasant (basically a soil igloo), but it was basically free, a roof over their heads, and kept the elements out. Once the farm started producing money they could then import better materials and workers to build a "proper" house.
 
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