Sasho Todorov

Yeah, laziji really works at sub-popcorn chicken size.

A massively underrated soft career skill is learning how to effectively police how many cooks enter the kitchen on key documents.

It really, really, *really* helps soft power wise to have a decent spread of people around the professional cocktail party circuit who have decent connections to you/decent memories of working as expats.

An underrated aspect of UAE soft power is that they opened up their white collar professional market to all comers. Switzerland had zero allies when the hammer finally sort of came down in 2010 on US taxpayers with Swiss accounts because they kept their sectors as firmly walled gardens.

Wnat strikes me about this is that a lot of this industry was fairly run of the mill insta influencers, not even people really enmeshed in the true high end escort industry. That that crowd has mostly kept shush is genuinely pretty remarkable.

The depressing irony in all of this is that Brad Lander is probably the condorcet winner this year. One of the reasons why approval voting (check all the people you like, top two check getters go to a run off), IMO, is superior to ranked choice.

IMO the most endearing trait of Doom is that it takes its stupid plot seriously. It would be much less entertaining if they did the usual self-aware slop.

I get why Dems picked this fight, but the biggest issue in US politics is that voters simply have never actually had to face the costs of GOP bad governance and now we're going to bail the GOP out through the midterms.

Which is pretty disastrous given that it means Dems most likely (1) won't have the reps required to do another extension after they win the house in 2026 and (2) it means we inherit a true financial crisis if we win in 2029.

I love how half of Japanese youtube is "the most unfathomably large portions ever - could you ever dream of even challenging this?" and it's basically an average meal at the Cheesecake Factory.

There's a lot of people who spent their lives trying to become the next Klein/Yglesias instead of pursuing traditional paths to power and the total collapse of the internet ad economy in the late 2010s was a brutal reminder that that path was a total dead end.

IMO a lot of the Buttigieg hatred is that he is of the same age and from the exact same cultural milieu (down to being in the same graduating classes from the same schools) as a lot of the poasting verse, so his success over time is bitterly resented by his former classmates.

IMO this is why a lot of the "Americans massively overestimate the % of people who are X" studies miss the point. To the median human, 10% isn't really "1-in-10" so much as "a very small amount that I am unlikely to encounter IRL", while 30% is "small, but visible in my day to day life."

5,400 KG (12,000 pounds) is still a pretty low munitions payload by modern standards.

No, this was guardsmen. It was in the section of the book pre-Cadia shattering and Guilliman returning.

Do you remember the number given? In canon the Marauder has a fairly low munitions payload - 4,800 KGs. The F-35 packs 8,200 KGs, for comparison.

See also how the writers hyped up in the Guilliman returns series, this "massive convoy" of 500,000 troops around Terra, destined for Cadia, which in universe apparently took years to assemble and is a major effort. Something that was maybe 1.5 conscription year classes for WWI France.

Yes, but the underlying problem in all of this is much more that 40k writers have no real sense of what warfare is, so you end up with stuff like "the titanic power of this magnificent artillery piece" which, when you look at the numbers, has barely 2/3rds the throw weight of a WWII era 155mm piece.

Though it is very funny that the canonical earthshaker cannon would be considered pretty underpowered for heavy artillery in WWI, let alone subsequently.

In effect, if anything the problem is the Ptolemaic dynasty remains too ambitious over time (through Cleopatra, as you discussed in ACOUP) and never really adjusts to the idea that they rule Egypt vs. Egypt as a springboard to Alexander. I.e. the same thing that nearly sunk the early USSR.

Really bringing Egyptians into the state structure would render the Ptolemaic position in Egypt much more stable, but it would also hamstring their ability to really bargain with the wider Hellenistic sphere of elites, whose shared class interest is keeping Greco-Macedonians on top.

Though, on the Ptolemaic and Seleucid fronts, it does seem like land grants are an extremely cheap way of compensating soldiers. You already need a massive amount of overhead to tax agriculture. Distributing plots means the soldier is individually responsible for collecting part of his own income.

IMO the Antigonids are getting a massive rebate from the fact that they are the homeland of the settler population vs. being the colonial state in need of importing the settler population. Not quite a full Rome situation, but more comparable in terms of greater bargaining power for the state.

The Hellenistic powers are fascinatingly unique in the sense of that you have an array of states whose elites have strongly shared cultural and ethnic backgrounds, and all of which have a credible claim to the mantle of a substantially larger, though currently divided, state.

There's also the underlying problem here that no Ptolemy ever adopts the position of "Hellenism in One Country", even though the need for the garrison state means that they are never really able to consolidate the kinds of gains outside of their core territory that would be necessary to make a play.

At least bullion wise (which seems to be the critical challenge for the Ptolemaic state), the actual land grants definitely bring the settler-colonist soldier well into the realm of better compensated military men. But 4-5 grams of silver per day is a pretty middling pay structure.

I think the challenge re: overpaid is that this seems to primarily be relative to the Roman soldier, who is arguably comically *underpaid* well into the imperial era and really only starts making competitive wages (and then way *too* competitive wages) around the time of Severus.

If they come a bit later / invest more into it, they would have had a stranglehold on the highly monetizable influx of luxury goods from the Indian ocean trade into the wider Mediterranean.

Though I think the challenge here is that the primary export is grain, so that's locked up with the above problems of market dumping and the like.

What really seems to have screwed the Ptolemies is being around too early to really exploit direct ocean trade with India.

Does the below theory make sense? (Basically: Ptolemies being dependent on market makers in order to convert their in kind grain taxes into the silver they need leads to artificially low grain prices and corresponding high in kind grain taxes).

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