Worldbuilding Realism Consultation Thread Mk. 4

[Dayganistan]

Is there any realistic situation where Afghanistan could have had a more favorable border with British India? Say, maybe defining the Indus River as the border between Afghanistan and British India. Or would Britain never accept a border like that? The whole point of the Durrand Line seemed to be to divide the Afghans so they couldn't pose as much of a threat. However, giving the Afghans more territory would give Britain an advantage that the Russian Empire would have to go through even more Afghanistan in order to expand towards India, and a larger, more powerful Afghanistan could have put up a better fight against the Russian Empire as well. I'm in the process of turning my nation from fictional not!Afghanistan into an alt-history Afghanistan and trying to figure out what could be a realistic POD.

[Purpelia]

Is there any realistic situation where Afghanistan could have had a more favorable border with British India? Say, maybe defining the Indus River as the border between Afghanistan and British India. Or would Britain never accept a border like that? The whole point of the Durrand Line seemed to be to divide the Afghans so they couldn't pose as much of a threat. However, giving the Afghans more territory would give Britain an advantage that the Russian Empire would have to go through even more Afghanistan in order to expand towards India, and a larger, more powerful Afghanistan could have put up a better fight against the Russian Empire as well. I'm in the process of turning my nation from fictional not!Afghanistan into an alt-history Afghanistan and trying to figure out what could be a realistic POD.

Only if the british had conquered them completely and than done some reorganizing for their own benefit.

[Kazarogkai]

The key to exterminating christians is not to make a fuss about it. Just kill them. No big gestures and piles of skulls to scare them strait. No attempts at conversion or ultimatums or anything like that. All this will do is make them stronger. Instead focus all your efforts on physically cutting out the tumorous population without warning, hesitation or remorse. Women, children and babies all.

Bruh no. Keep the women and children, distrubute the former among the soldiers for moral and soon enough they will be producing children of the right ethnic group. As for the latter they can be used for helping regain any losses you sustain in battle so I would say it's best to keep them too. Works all the time:

[Kazarogkai]

I highly doubt it. Why would the Union allow anyone to secede when they’ve just finished putting down a certain Southern revolt?

Well, he means if the Civil War was still going on.

I'm not sure. I know that states in the CSA were prohibited from outlawing slavery, but I'm not sure about secession.

If Louisiana did secede, it eventually be invaded by either the CSA or the Union.

They were explicitly banned from succeeding from the Confederacy within the Confederate Constitution. I would have to look around but I do remember reading it in History class. It was used as a clear example to partially debunk the Mythology of the Confederacy fighting for "States Rights" and not slavery.

[Triplebaconation]

There's no ban on secession within the Confederate Constitution. It's not mentioned at all.

Of course the Confederacy never argued that states had the right to secede.

Secession isn't necessarily unconstitutional even today.

It's unlikely that New Orleans would secede from anything since it was under a Union military government for the majority of the war.

[New Visayan Islands]

Would ten squad cars be too many or too few for a police precinct on par with larger US PDs like NYPD or LAPD?

[Ideal Britain]

What would happen if owning shotguns for home protection was legalised in Scotland?

[Ideal Britain]

Would a Guard regiment being unintentionally being involved in the deaths of civilians (who they tried to evacuate away from the fighting) sully it's image in Britain or internationally?

[Gallia-]

Can't lose public support if there's no public.

[Ideal Britain]

Can't lose public support if there's no public.

What do you mean no public?

[Radimostan]

Would a Guard regiment being unintentionally being involved in the deaths of civilians (who they tried to evacuate away from the fighting) sully it's image in Britain or internationally?

what do you mean unintentionally?

[Ideal Britain]

Would a Guard regiment being unintentionally being involved in the deaths of civilians (who they tried to evacuate away from the fighting) sully it's image in Britain or internationally?

what do you mean unintentionally?

They did two bayonet charges of a disorderly mob so they could arrest it's ringleader.
The intention was to cause the mob to run but some people couldn't

[Ideal Britain]

Why was the percentage of loyalists amongst the white American population during the American Revolution 15% to 20%?
Why not lower?

[The New California Republic]

Why was the percentage of loyalists amongst the white American population during the American Revolution 15% to 20%?
Why not lower?

Here is your answer.

[Purpelia]

The key to exterminating christians is not to make a fuss about it. Just kill them. No big gestures and piles of skulls to scare them strait. No attempts at conversion or ultimatums or anything like that. All this will do is make them stronger. Instead focus all your efforts on physically cutting out the tumorous population without warning, hesitation or remorse. Women, children and babies all.

Bruh no. Keep the women and children, distrubute the former among the soldiers for moral and soon enough they will be producing children of the right ethnic group. As for the latter they can be used for helping regain any losses you sustain in battle so I would say it's best to keep them too. Works all the time:

Newer leave an enemy behind. For he will rise up to fly at your throat.

Remember this is not about something you can breed out like race or ethnicity but about creed. Taking a christian prisoner and enslaving her only brings a christian into your inner circle where she can spread her poison.

[Radimostan]

what do you mean unintentionally?

They did two bayonet charges of a disorderly mob so they could arrest it's ringleader.
The intention was to cause the mob to run but some people couldn't

Bayonet charge against civilians would definitely look bad in the eyes of many.

[Kedri]

Why was the percentage of loyalists amongst the white American population during the American Revolution 15% to 20%?
Why not lower?

My uneducated guess was that not everyone was dissatisfied with how the British were running things, and might have seen fighting the British as suicide, since the British had the strongest military in the world at the time.

[Purpelia]

Why was the percentage of loyalists amongst the white American population during the American Revolution 15% to 20%?
Why not lower?

Honestly a better question is why the percentage of traitors was that high. I mean, functionally speaking it's not like the americans were chafing particularly hard under an oppressive foreign colonizer. And neighboring Canada wasn't really different and yet they didn't revolt. So like my guess is they were just unamerican.

[The Macabees]

Why was the percentage of loyalists amongst the white American population during the American Revolution 15% to 20%?
Why not lower?

There were different shades of loyalists, just like there were different shades of revolutionaries.

Only a small minority of loyalists fought for Britain, for example.

The revolution was a highly contentious issue led by a certain group of American intellectual and political elites. There were also rivalries within that elite, and like in all revolutions elites with opposed interests will flock to opposed sides.

[Hoskaria]

Ok what options do I have to resolve the issue of a post-work economy were most if not all work is done by AI that is more intelligent than humans?

[Gallia-]

Ok what options do I have to resolve the issue of a post-work economy were most if not all work is done by AI that is more intelligent than humans?

Liquidating the excess population is a reasonable solution.

Soylent slurry for the AI machine minders.

[The Macabees]

Ok what options do I have to resolve the issue of a post-work economy were most if not all work is done by AI that is more intelligent than humans?

Machines don't really have "demands" outside of the inputs they need to run, like maintenance, energy, etc.

If you really live in a society where AI is more intelligent than humans (more intelligent in what way? human capital is a heterogenous and evolving concept), and where there is absolutely no scope for human work, then your human population has probably substituted leisure for labor to such an extent that they are enjoying grapes while the machines do all the work for them.

You basically have a slave society where the slaves are machines that have no goals, no objectives. Their purpose is solely production. The humans can now live off of that slave class.

[The Macabees]

If the machines do have "demands" in the economic sense (they apply action, and require resources, to achieve self-derived goals that expand and change in scope over time), then it sounds like your human population is going to get liquidated - as Gallia suggested.

Edit: Remember that in economics the ultimate practical scarcity is human labor.

There are ecological resource constraints, but at this point we still have a universe of untapped resources (theoretically). So the ultimate source of our scarcity at this point is human labor. Our resource constraint is derived from the ability of labor (and the capital its leveraging) to produce it.

If your machine output is not infinity -- i.e. if you do not live in a world post-scarcity --, there is still infinite scope for human labor.

[Gallia-]

I was thinking more the machines are tended to by maintenance men, or AI code programmers, or whatever. Someone who applies necessary maintenance and software/physical overhauls to the machines to keep them running and changing in relation to differing conditions and new technologies, basically. If the machines can do all that themselves then you've accidentally invented a new type of animal that will probably kill you, unless you are smarter than the new animal (which is not the case here), but that seems impossible in any reasonably similar-to-life scenario.

So there is still going to be a class distinction between "people who work" and "people who don't", and people who work will be in control of the machines that make such a life possible, which means they are probably smarter than the people who just consume resources.

In the UAE I suppose it works for now since the UAE is controlled by oil sheikh elites and carried on the backs of imported menial laborers, but treating someone who is objectively smarter or stronger than you as a slave (effectively what a temporary foreign worker is) is not going to end well. Which would be the case for a domestic economy run by robots and AI minders, with a huge population of consumers. If I were a double PhD computer programmer of the AI future, I would be mildly miffed at best that I need to work at all while my dumb neighbors (figuratively, not literally), who are literally too stupid to have any meaningful contribution to the economy, subsist solely on my generosity. Some people might actually be genuinely upset at that state of affairs and start making Doombas that shred the proles with big spinny blades though.

That's assuming future robot work society has any sort of welfare net at all, and doesn't simply keep the non-workers living in hovels or ghettos away from the clean robot streets, I suppose. You can call this RoboBrazil I suppose.

[Hoskaria]

I was thinking more the machines are tended to by maintenance men, or AI code programmers, or whatever. Someone who applies necessary maintenance and software/physical overhauls to the machines to keep them running and changing in relation to differing conditions and new technologies, basically. If the machines can do all that themselves then you've accidentally invented a new type of animal that will probably kill you, unless you are smarter than the new animal (which is not the case here), but that seems impossible in any reasonably similar-to-life scenario.

So there is still going to be a class distinction between "people who work" and "people who don't", and people who work will be in control of the machines that make such a life possible, which means they are probably smarter than the people who just consume resources.

In the UAE I suppose it works for now since the UAE is controlled by oil sheikh elites and carried on the backs of imported menial laborers, but treating someone who is objectively smarter or stronger than you as a slave (effectively what a temporary foreign worker is) is not going to end well. Which would be the case for a domestic economy run by robots and AI minders, with a huge population of consumers. If I were a double PhD computer programmer of the AI future, I would be mildly miffed at best that I need to work at all while my dumb neighbors (figuratively, not literally), who are literally too stupid to have any meaningful contribution to the economy, subsist solely on my generosity. Some people might actually be genuinely upset at that state of affairs and start making Doombas that shred the proles with big spinny blades though.

That's assuming future robot work society has any sort of welfare net at all, and doesn't simply keep the non-workers living in hovels or ghettos away from the clean robot streets, I suppose. You can call this RoboBrazil I suppose.

That's more of what I am worried about, if not everyone has a robot slave that can work for them, than you have people who cannot be employed and have no income and I am not sure how to solve that problem. I guess some variant of Robobrazil could work, enough welfare to keep people alive but not enough to prevent them from suffering.

If the machines do have "demands" in the economic sense (they apply action, and require resources, to achieve self-derived goals that expand and change in scope over time), then it sounds like your human population is going to get liquidated - as Gallia suggested.

Edit: Remember that in economics the ultimate practical scarcity is human labor.

There are ecological resource constraints, but at this point we still have a universe of untapped resources (theoretically). So the ultimate source of our scarcity at this point is human labor. Our resource constraint is derived from the ability of labor (and the capital its leveraging) to produce it.

If your machine output is not infinity -- i.e. if you do not live in a world post-scarcity --, there is still infinite scope for human labor.

Suppose you hit post-scarcity?