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@Lord Brutus I don't think he will suffer any consequence for that myself, although I would be delighted to be wrong on this. I do however think that there's a good chance that he will get caught on tax evasion.

kurczak said:

Wut. Do you have a copy of the form? What's its number?

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If memory serves I filed this before applying for my green card, so again it might not apply to the lottery. I also think that it was introduced by Trump so it might not have been a thing when you came in.

Oh right I forgot about that. Well, I would say that that is a trap, and to not fall for it. There will not be any opportunity waiting for them in the states that they couldn't find elsewhere, unless they have some special skills (and even then age might be a problem, depending on how old they are).

I did not come in on a lottery myself so it might be different for them, but I was made to sign up a piece of paper that states that I am not eligible for any form of government assistance, ever. So that is also something to be aware of (again, that might not necessarily be a thing for the lottery).

I think he will unless he gets thrown in jail before that or otherwise formally disqualified from running for office. Main reason being that it is a fantastic machine for him to dupe people into donating money that he then can use for whatever. I hope he gets to wear a suit matching the color of his face before then myself.

You can find all sorts of lists on Google. It doesn't get any more reliable than that unless you narrow down what the important factors for you are, as others have said.

If you are actually thinking about coming to live in the US, here's my advice as someone who has done it: don't. There are better countries to move to where it's easier to enter, quality of life/healthcare is better, and you don't necessarily need to have particular skill sets to make a living.

Edit: ninjaed me! Since you are asking specifically about unqualified labor, I reinforce my last point. There is no place in the US where unqualified labor allows you to make a good living. It's gotten so bad that many who live here are persuaded that people should not be able to make a living for anything that does not require a particular skill set.

Berzerker Jay said:

So you think the root-cultures for the fictional cultures in the game are off-topic to discussions around historic realism and its relationship to the factions in the game...?

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Precisely.

I believe others have answered your other comments. And from the dev side, it's not a matter of opinion. They know exactly the numbers at play here, as players all we can do is report what we perceive. And I am sorry but you seem to be the minority here, and many of the people who agree on armors being unbalanced have many, many hours in the game.

Terco_Viejo said:

Thank you, someone had to say it .

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My pleasure.

MadVader said:

I can't watch that, I'm a transphobic neoliberal fascist.

You mean this quote? It's about who is more crazy by gender in the abstract, and is behind a paywall, you academic communists are reading that for free.

My question was about whether MTF were predominant or just the loudest *****es (they were, but the trends show more even MTF and FTM numbers). And I was speculating about interesting psychological causes of gender dysphoria, not the level of crazy in trans populations.

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My bad, I thought it was open but I must have been logged in my university system. I just think it's an interesting read, this is not a simple topic and I don't think that it can be explained in simple terms.

There is a website that can be used to make any paper open, but I am not sure if me posting that here would go against the forum rules (I don't really consider it piracy myself because it is perfectly fine for anyone who has access to send papers to someone who doesn't in an email, but not everyone agrees with that view).

@MadVader you might be interested in reading this

Akka said:

Well, the thing is, the degree of protection we expect from an armor to find the good balance and make it fun DOES come from our real-world expectation, i.e. "realism".
Of course we don't expect extreme realism, but we do expect some sort of logical hierarchy (plate protecting better than mail, powerful weapons being stronger than weak ones, etc.) and results that don't feel too "off" (a club going straight through lamellar armor is just ridiculous).

The discussion usually devolves because when the subject comes, there is usually some contrarians/fanboys who play dumb and pretend the world works differently than it does and try to rationalize the flaws of the game as being adequate.

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Yeah but then we end up with ten pages of discussion over what the Norses or the Ancient Romans or whoever you want did and didn't, which honestly belongs in the off topic section. It's just not helpful for the development of the game.

To me the issue is very very simple. Players should perceive a difference between wearing a tunic and metal armor when fighting enemies, at least low level enemies (of course high and even mid tier troops should still be a threat). Seems to me like most people don't. This kills the sense of progression, and is therefore bad. End of thread.

Of course whenever something like this gets brought up it devolves into a discussion on historic realism, but the real issue is that this is just not good balance. Armor is part of the progression, getting high end armor should at the very least make you invulnerable from attacks from the cannon fodder troops.

@Sundeki but wouldn't giving full employment status as an option fix all of that? If you work more than X hours you can decide to be turned into a full time employee, but if you want to stay as a gig worker you can. Looks to me like that would keep the good and remove the bad.

I do agree that this is more a symptom than the root problem though. A big reason why this is a big issue in the US especially is healthcare. Not receiving health insurance means that you have to buy it on your own, and that is very expensive.

Given the amount of money that these companies bring in, they can afford to pay for benefits.


And workers who want the flexibility can still do it, they can work part time. Or at least one should give them the choice between working as contractors or working as proper employees, with no retaliation possible from the company if they choose to be employees (e.g. the take home pay needs to be comparable etc.).

I do agree that the implementation of these regulations would be nuanced, the direction to follow however seems pretty clear to me.

kurczak said:

He presented his claims for literal review by anyone who speaks German.

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Fixed! Honestly, I am peeved about that. I would love to read the actual paper.

You are not wrong on the medium article though. To be fair I didn't say it was great, I said it was relevant!

Edit: even the proper fact checks on this are in German! Obviously since one can only really review the paper if they understand the language it is written in.

Because we are all friends here!

Henlo fren.

Cancel culture is this thing where people do things that the general society does not accept, and then suffer consequences from it.

I like to think about it this way: 40 to 60 years ago you would get fired from your job for openly admitting being gay, and you would get in a lot of trouble if you were a black man dating a white woman (or the other way around). Lots of other examples to be had, I am sure y'all can think of many (especially those of us who are older). Nowadays the general society does not see that kind of discrimination acceptable anymore, therefore people who keep practicing it openly lose their jobs. Extend as needed to other types of good old fashioned racism/discrimination towards people with disabilities/what have you.

Funny thing is, the people who cry over cancel culture today would have happily gone along with it in the good old times when being racist was cool.

MadVader said:

From the article I've read he seized his moment in the spotlight early in the pandemic by making alarmist claims on Twitter (not crazy stuff, but not quite scientific, just like the one here). His Twitter followers exploded from a few bored people to many. I bet his new found social media fame was also monetized is some way.
Why do people who should know better trade their professional credibility for fame and followers? Maybe their academic career wasn't going anywhere anyway, so they said "**** it" and found themselves a new audience who uncritically accepts their every word.

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That's the thing though, this guy was (and still is I guess) very much academically successful.


The ERC is one of the most difficult research grants to get in Europe, and he won it three times in a row. He pretty much is a rock star in his field. Which of course has nothing to do with virology, so he really isn't any more qualified than me or you to talk about that. I have no idea why someone like this would throw his reputation down the drain to chase after something like that.

Related:

TimIZ said:

Excess mortality worldwide:

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1362006269545095174

A few days ago a top rated physics (!) professor from Hamburg University published a so called "study" about the origin of the corona virus. He only used newspaper articles and youtube videos as sources, some of them very questionable like EpochTimes and Focus. I wouldn`t have dared to do this even as a "you missed one time too often so please write 5 pages" task.

Do you also experience that some of your scientists make total fools of themselves right now or is that a German speciality?

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I work in academia in robotics, and there's a *lot* of people who are trying to jump on the covid bandwagon trying to turn their research into something that is useful to deal with it. Partially out of honest desire to try to help with the emergency, but at least some people are just doing it in an attempt to make themselves look better. And it can get a little ridiculous when sometimes the arguments they come up with as to why their research can be useful for covid are forced.

With that said, this is so much worse in the sense that the man isn't even trying to do science in that paper. It's not just someone stepping out of their domain and making a fool of themselves, there's not a hint of science in this work. At least from what I can judge by the university page, which basically says as much.


Since the paper itself is in German (which I find extremely puzzling, if he wants to have an open discussion on this with everyone in the world wouldn't it make more sense to write it in English?).

I don't know, maybe a hint of insanity in a late career scientist who's past his prime?

@MadVader aw stop it, you are making me blush

I am not sure if I really count as new blood though, I have been lurking since 2017 (and probably before that, I just took a while to make an account). Bannerlord gave me an excuse to become active I suppose though (well, that, and being stuck at home for various reasons).

I guess that I am however new enough to not know what AG stands for. But them acronyms have always been confusing to me.

Ikea Knight said:

On top of that, I think one of the reasons why I hardly engage in Bannerlord-discussions anymore is simply because me and others have expressed their thoughts already in the closed beta anyway. ( oh and obviously there is that feeling of being ignored )

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I can definitely related to that myself. Right now I am kind of waiting to see if the good stuff ever comes out.

Also, Facebook is bad and should feel bad.

dijiTurk said:

If two scentists(experts) have two different arguments, and each say 'mine is reality' : Then you need to check both arguments to reach acually real one, right? If i say(non-expert) my argument, you should check it too with knew that im not an expert. Whats wrong if you know how to reach reality?

Telling my basic argument as just paranoic does not simply make you reach the reality. Let experts & public opinion bring their arguments together..then work on each arguments scientific & transparent? This makes you reach reality..

Of course, freedom of expression is important as transparency for each countries, but you can basicly intrested in only some arguments that you like & you can say: " 'some animals more equal than others' on the road of reality."

My argument was just an harmless idea about corona's origin, and i also tell its only an option & not reality. Also no option is certain atm. Countries/experts must reach reality together. Each options should be on desk, each should be checked scientificly & transparent for the world.

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When two experts have different opinions they settle it in peer reviewed papers. As I have shown earlier there are peer reviewed papers on whether covid came from bats or not, because that is a theory that has some merit. There is not a single actual expert in the field who would even consider that covid was created in a lab to fight cancer.

This is how you find out if someone is actually an expert in something:

1) Go to Scopus https://www.scopus.com/home.uri.

2) Click on "author search" and look them up by their name.

3) See how many peer reviewed papers they have and what their citation metrics are.

This is what the profile of an expert in virology should look like.



As you can see there is some variability in the sense that people can be experts and still some will be more academically successful than others (which does not necessarily mean that one is "better" than the other). However there is a bare minimum of proficiency that you have to show. If you don't have at least a h-index of 10 as a full professor in a high impact field like virology or any medical field really, well that's a red flag.

Chances are people who push conspiracy theories won't even show up on Scopus so it's usually pretty easy to tell.

Now of course one can be a non expert and still be right by sheer chance. But that's not how any of this works. When you hear an outlandish theory on virus that is being brought up by the local herbalist before one even considers it there needs to be strong evidence. "This one guy had covid and got a bit better from his cancer is not it". My grandpa had covid and after he recovered his backpain was better for a couple of weeks, doesn't mean that covid cures back pain.


If I sound overly passionate about this it's because I am. All of this is very, very important. We live in a day and age where science is being overthrown by sensationalism and social media mumbo jumbo. Science is what makes your car start when you leave your house in the morning, not reptilians or adorably tiny hamsters running in wheels.

Sometimes there is not an answer to a question, no matter how much we want to have one. The best evidence that we have for the bat theory is circumstantial.


Sure, it looks compatible with a bat coronavirus. It could possibly also come from a pangolin. But we can't unequivocally say if it's one way or the other, or even if it's either. Which is not to say that it was created in a lab (for that there's about as much evidence as there is to prove that I personally assembled the virus together with really small tweezers in the summer of 2019 because I needed something fun to do). But we also can't say for sure that it came from a bat. I don't think that we will ever know exactly where it came from, although it's probably safe to say that it had a zoonotic origin of some kind.