- Location
- Seattle, Washington, USA
Yeah, definitely. We're not suffering the infrastructure collapse they are, after all.
And we don't have Dragon serving as a major cell-phone provider.
- Location
- Seattle, Washington, USA
Systems like Discord rely on network infrastructure that Earth Bet is suffering major disruptions and breakdowns in. While our Earth is moving to networked platforms, Earth Bet would be moving the other way, to decentralized protocols.
- Location
- America
To be cynical, I am not sure this kind of dragon is actually well suited to S9, a shadow run or d&d dragon with magic will make a impact on them, but a simple Brute force dragon can be countered with stealth, hostages, hit and run tactics, exotic durability ignoring attacks. Granted it is also worth remembering said dragon has the mind of skitter which will lead to a SNAFU, if not FUBAR moment.
If wyvern pulls off a golden victory, it is going to require planning, teamwork and effort, it will not be easy.
Or she can find the dragon form comes with D&D magic or other exotic BS and cast mind blank and invisibility, A stealth dragon ruins many plans. But right now she a little too one trick for that fight.
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Isn't the internet a relatively decentralized, disruption-tolerant communications structure? (A given internet service can of course be centralized, but the network infrastructure isn't, I thought.)
Yes, but that doesn't mean you are always connected to the internet.
The Press to talk feature in question was to let the phones work like walkie-talkies and able to communicate with each other without relying on connecting to either a cell tower or a wifi.
The modern apps people are talking about require external infrastructure to the phones. You need that external infrastructure for a cell phone to connect to the internet.
You either need one of the following:
- a nearby wifi hotspot which partially by design (FCC regs) has an extremely limited range (large buildings use repeaters and multiple hotspots) to connect to the internet via 802.11 wireless Ethernet
- A cell phone tower in range and not obstructed or jammed for a cellular internet connection.
Yes, the internet is designed to deal with disruptions. It was designed to be able to automatically reroute communications if a given route goes down. Nuclear attacks were in mind, with the original backbones (now obsolete) placed away from but near major cities.
That doesn't mean an individual site or service is protected, as was evidenced last year when the fire knocked out both SB and SV for a week. It just means that if say the direct connection under the river from say Minneapolis to St. Paul is disrupted it can respond by routing through another river crossing to the north or south.
I note that his beliefs don't even hold up internally. Even if one presumes he was right, his plan was a terrible one.
Take an emotion-based Changer, one that his plan relied on having poor self control and a propensity for berserk rages, and possibly strong enough to stand up to an Endbringer - again, a surmise underlying/justifying his plan. Now, take that Changer and force them into a position where they are surrounded by you and your allies and their assets, and fill them with a massive amount of self-righteous rage and hatred for you and your organization. The very assumptions his plan were based on straightforwardly lead to the end result being a berserk Wyvern obliterating a good chunk of the PRT and Protectorate in a fury, sooner rather than later.
His plan could only work if he was wrong, and events happened to fall out just right anyway despite his own errors; which is not a good thing for a plan. But he didn't follow up on his own logic, because if he did it would mean he couldn't get what he wanted; and the whole scheme in the first place was basically built on backwards reasoning to get him what he wanted.
This is the reason I call Idiot Ball on every story that has the PRT playing strong arm.
There's a reason literally nobody Drafts soldiers anymore.
Forcing somebody to sign up doesn't get you allies. At best it gains you reluctant cooperation to the bare minimum required, at worst it gains you an enemy waiting to fuck you over the second they can. Oh and be a disaster for morale and discipline the entire time. Which is far more of a problem than most non-military people realize.
What it will never get you is a motivated, helpful, or dedicated ally. You want somebody who'll crawl on their belly under fire to drag a buddy to safety? It won't be this person that's for fucking sure.
Grats, you just strongarmed this teenager (a demographic that is contrary and anti-authoritarian by default) into your Wards. After 2 years of utterly miserable and unproductive service they will turn 18, most assuredly not sign up for the Protectorate, hate you and your organization forever, and shit talk you to anybody who asks till the end of time.
I'm shocked Taylor just doesn't threaten to join the E88.
"So, what I'm hearing is you want me to go join the E88? After getting bullied into a trigger event by somebody you were supposed to be watching so they didn't do shit like that you want to try and bully me some more with a bunch of bullshit charges? And you expect me to be cooperative? Fuck you. Explain to me how you were incompetent enough to let one of your so called Heros torture me for two years while you didn't have a clue, how you trying to pull this shit on me doesn't make you just the same as the corrupt assholes in the school who covered it up, and how you're going to make that right. Then maybe I don't walk into a TV studio and explain why I'm going to join the lesser of two evils, and by that I mean the Neo-Nazi's. Oh and a lawyer would be great before you keep trying to threaten the minor who's a victim of the crime committed by somebody you're responsible for. Mrs Conspiracy After the Fact."
I'm reminded of a comment that somebody made in another fic where Taylor was strongarmed into the Wards; Implacable I think (which yes, turned out poorly for the PRT). Although in that case Piggot was the prime mover.
The point made was that you are dealing with people who if ex-military joined well after the draft ended, and if not ex-military are in nominally all volunteer organizations. The result being that they have no personal experience with how corrosive a draft is to morale and cooperation, and also means that they've spent their careers largely surrounded by gung-ho types who believe in the job. So deep down they don't really get how bad an idea it is, much less how grit-in-the-gears somebody who really, really doesn't want to cooperate can be.
And when somebody is really determined to get what they want they tend to be really good at ignoring inconvenient facts, especially ones they have no personal experience with. In this case, that would be Armsmaster, who doesn't have such experience - the closest equivalent would be Sophia, whom he barely pays attention to like the other Wards - along with being bad at understanding other people by his own admission. He's used to dealing with people who want to be there and as such people over whom he and the PRT/Protectorate have plenty of psychological leverage on; it's much easier to get somebody to go along with the program when they don't want to be kicked out. And you'll note how he barely even gave any thought into how he was going to get Wyvern to actually cooperate with him.
That explains individual attitudes, but I'm also offended by lack of institutional memory.
Soldiers hating their officers enough to toss grenades into their tents while deployed made it into pop culture.
The military loves paperwork. It runs on paperwork more than it does ammo. There are procedures and policies for everything. There should be a document somewhere in their recruiting manuals outright stating that unwilling members are liabilities rather than assets and should be avoided at all costs.
Likely; but the PRT & Protectorate aren't military; they're fairly new.
Well, I'd expect a brand new department to do a fair bit of cribbing other peoples notes. No point in reinventing the wheel and all.
Also bit of Fridge(shower) Logic I had.
Making things even worse for strong arming people into the wards, Parahumans are all more conflict prone than normals. While the exact details of the conflict drive wouldn't be known, the data would be there. Parahumans get in fights.
Setting yourself up as in an antagonistic role is another Bad Choice in terms of setting up an effective force. That's not a relationship that will cool down over time, it'll just keep escalating.
Even worse, if they wanted to Do some real damage, they stay and learn how you work, codes, and importantly identities. And then leave to do damage.....they can't force you to stay...but they hope the brainwashing and peer pressure has kicked in.
I would burn it to the ground. And dance in the ashes.
Crazael
Rehydrated Demon King
- Location
- Lost to the vagaries of time.
I dont think strong arming is necessarily an idiot vall situation. While i agree that it is rarely the best option, it is also rarely catastrophically bad. Usually, the worst you get out of it is someone who is unmotivated and unhelpful. Which is mostly just a nuisance and is still better than having the same person outside of your control causing trouble.
It's not even a little true that nobody drafts soldiers. Many countries still have outright conscription in force. And there's a long-running body of practice around how to get conscripts to fight and how to keep them under control. (And even the US during the recent Iraq-and-Afghanistan...business did force a lot of people to be there who were not active service military by choice.)
I mean, it's certainly true that that conscription imposes problems and doesn't always work well. And it's probably a significantly worse idea applied to parahumans, who are intrinsically both unique and maladjusted and never seem to go through the kind of regimented training both volunteer and conscript militaries consider essential...
It's not hard to see how you'd slide into normalizing it though. I mean, if a caught villain volunteers to rebrand and serve in the Protectorate you don't want to give up that asset, right? Especially considering that there's effectively no 'neutral' option - if you decline they'll have nothing to do but be a villain again if they ever get out of prison. Then you can just keep stacking quotation marks on that 'volunteers' until you're being very stupid indeed.
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- Location
- Seattle, Washington, USA
The thing is that Armsmaster is confident enough in his own abilities that he actually does think he could win that fight. He's wrong, but he doesn't know that.
Nobody effective.
There's a reason its an all volunteer army, why special forces are double or triple volunteers.
People who want to be there are a million times more effective.
Please note this is different from nations with mandatory service, for two reasons. When everyone goes its not personal, its the same as school. Sure lots of of would have prefered not going to school at some point, but whatever its school and its gotta be done.
And the smart nations treat it like school. It's not 'surprise you're doing this now!' its "You've selected X branch for your required service time" and can be used to help you with your career of choice while they teach you the correct specialization. They go out of their way to make the experience as painless as possible.
They get some people who decide they like military life sticking around, and the rest get hands on training and experience for whatever their civilian career is going to be.
There's a toxic effect on morale and discipline involved that's not very flashy, but is very much a Bad Thing. One unwilling participant is not worth a measurable drop in performance from the rest of the building. It's a real thing. Ever been in a job that would have been fine except for that one person. This is how you get that one person.
Also, this assumption you've made is exactly the bad one Tagg and (less often) Piggot make. That there's two options 'under my control' and 'causing trouble'.
That kind of attitude is how you make villains, when you could be lining up independent heros as allies.
- Location
- Russia
Admittedly, it doesn't really work that way here in Russia. There is a reason why people actively try to cripple themselves to avoid mandatory service, and why it actually became actively legally punishable to do.
Crazael
Rehydrated Demon King
- Location
- Lost to the vagaries of time.
You overstate the severity of the issue. And again, those downsides are still better than letting someone continue to cause trouble as a vigilante or villain.
Remember, most people arent going to make trouble just to spite the Protectorate or PRT. Especially if they decide the benefits are worth sticking around.
So actually lots of countries do it, but you consider them to either not count by being ineffective or not count because they're drafting people in a way that is 'not personal'?
It's not really clear that the PRT sees independent heroes as useful (except Panacea obviously), and it's not really clear whether they're wrong about that, though it's pretty clear that turning them into villains is counterproductive.
Then again the Russian army doesn't have a reputation of being especially effective. LARGE yes. Unendingly so is the sterotype even more than the Chinese, is unending Russian manpower.
And by 'cause trouble' you mean 'not obey my every whim'.
New Wave exists. 'not working for the PRT' doesn't immediately mean 'super villain' even if PRT policy seems to be to try as hard as possible to make it that way.
If you can't see the difference between "Surprise you're a child solider" and "Here's a 2 year vocational post secondary education, in a field you get to pick" I really can't help you.
More useful than pissing people off enough to become villians by being overly aggressive.
Parian is a great example of this. A country full of supers that mostly just minded their own damn business would be awesome, but the PRT's approach is basically 'militarize everybody, no matter the outcome.'
That's why there's more villains than heros. Hell everybody's favorite super villains, even the actual main character of the story are lessons in this. All of them are 'villains' by circumstances. Lisa was recruited at gunpoint, Brian wants help with family issues and needs the money, Alec (desperately) needs protective custody, Rachel got railroaded and needs a lawyer.
Uber and Leet need a contract and a licensing deal.
And entire villain national orginization exists because of discriminatory laws being passed. Most of the Elite only exist because worm is a shitty setting designed to be as shitty as possible for supers to live in.
Of course I can, though your description of mandatory service seems...creative.
But mandatory national service is closer to that draft that you previously asserted "literally nobody" uses than impressing particular individuals anyway!
And neither is really much like recruiting Parahumans, because a key feature of military conscripts is that they're largely fungible and obtained in bulk. Certainly what Armsmaster is trying to do is something that mostly occurs in fiction, or maybe organized crime or intelligence operations where a blackmailed asset can be useful even if not trustworthy.
If only I'd said that just a little later in the paragraph?
Crazael
Rehydrated Demon King
- Location
- Lost to the vagaries of time.
New Wave isnt going around pinning gangbangers to walls with crossbow bolts. New Wave actively works with the PRT when they are active. New Wave is not a problem.
And no, that is not what i mean by "cause trouble". Im talking about stuff like Sophia's violent vigilantism. Or Uber and Leet who are being outright villains, even if they arent part of any gang.