People are hard to coerce by force alone. “why do these fellows feel like they must or ought to serve. A lot of historical fiction or fantasy settings fail to address this particular question or else answer it with a… Read More »Collections: Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part I: Why They Fight
Not the old kind. The smart one. “There’s also an impulse to do a sort of “Good Tsar, bad boyars” maneuver, where people say “it’s not the phones, it’s social media”. But this is an argument over whether guns kill… Read More »Phones Are Bad
Even famous scientist can argue badly. “The idea that the Haber-Bosch process has “brought nothing like shared prosperity” is an absolutely wild claim. Nitrogen fertilizers are so important to human existence that by the most common estimates, about half of… Read More »Book review: “Power and Progress”
Is it? And why?
And is it really?
There was not one God. “Reading a Bible translation today, the text seems to speak everywhere of a generic “God” or “the Lord”. This, however, is a linguistic illusion produced by later confessional versions, which flattened and standardised under abstract… Read More »How the God of Israel Was Born
Central planning does not work.
Writing the code was never the main issue. “They rant and claim the era of subscription software is finished, but they are subscribed to AI services and AI software. The amount they are paying to AI companies is far higher… Read More »Attack of the Vibe Coded Photoshop Clones
A good TIP.