u/Dulaman96

Commentators are throwing a lot of praise his way, I just wanted to throw some more!

I've been wondering this lately, short of overhauling the entire socioeconomic and political system, how would you actually get money out of politics in our current society? Say a party/coalition came to power that was significantly motivated to do this, what kind of legislation would be needed?

I'm aiming this question more at multiparty parliamentary democracies like the UK or NZ rather than the US as the American political landscape seems impossibly messed up at this point.

On the extreme end you could take inspiration from Cuban municipal elections where theres no campaigning at all, no advertising, no debates etc. The candidates just post their resume at the election booth and thats it. But without reforming the wider society this would be very difficult to enact.

A couple easy targets would be to have parties funded directly by the government rather than being funded by donations/membership fees. Every party would receive an equal advertising budget that would cover all advertising expenses; TV, social media, bill boards, etc. And each party would receive an administrative budget depending on how many seats they have, this would pay for staffers/aides/campaign managers/volunteer coordinators, etc. This feels pretty basic and would probably be a popular policy if it was announced today.

But then you run into the problem of non-party campaigners. There are plenty of individuals, companies, and lobbyists who pay for independent political ads for/against certain parties. It wouldn't be too hard to legislate against this too but you might run into cries of freedom of speech from certain groups of people.

The biggest issue would be privately owned media companies. If they decide to run content that is pro-X party, how do you stop it? Sure you can legislate that they can't explicitly support X party, but media companies will always have certain biases and its impossible to remove them. You can say something like 'if they interview candidate from party X for 30 minutes on prime time, they also need to interview a candidate from party Y for 30 minutes on primetime' but that doesnt ensure the interviews themselves are even. It also has the danger of being biased towards unbiased content; by this i mean, there isn't always 2 equal sides to a story, sometimes there's 10, sometimes there's 1, sometimes there's none. If X party has 5 scandals a month, is the media then forced to report on 5 scandals by Y party even if they dont exist?

To avoid this messy area of forcing media to report in a certain way, you could instead try introducing some legislation that provides a stop-gap between the owner of a private media company and the content it produces. This way, theoretically, the actual journalists are free to report how they see fit without undue influence from either the government or their corporate owners. However this would be very hard (maybe impossible?) to actually enforce.

There's also the issue of social media algorithms and the wealthy owners of those companies using the algorithms to influence elections. This would also be very hard to legislate away without first reforming other parts of society.

What are peoples thoughts on the topic?

I've been wondering this lately, short of overthrowing the entire system and establishing some form of socialism, how would you actually get money out of politics in our current society? Say a left wing party/coalition came to power that was significantly motivated to do this, what kind of legislation would be needed?

I'm aiming this question more at multiparty parliamentary democracies like the UK or NZ rather than the US as the American political landscape seems impossibly messed up at this point.

On the extreme end you could take inspiration from Cuba, but without reforming the wider society this would be very difficult to enact.

A couple easy targets would be to have parties funded directly by the government rather than donations/membership fees. Every party would receive an equal advertising budget that would cover all advertising expenses; TV, social media, bill boards, etc. And each party would receive an administrative budget depending on how many seats they have, this would pay for staffers/aides/campaign managers etc. This feels pretty basic and would probably be a popular policy if it was announced today.

But then you run into the problem of non-party campaigners. Plenty of individuals and companies pay for independent political ads for/against certain parties. It wouldn't be too hard to legislate against this too but you might run into cries of freedom of speech from certain groups of people.

The biggest issue would be privately owned media companies. If they decide to run content that is pro-X party, how do you stop it? Sure you can legislate that they can't explicitly support X party, but media companies will always have certain biases and its impossible to remove them. You can say something like 'if they interview candidate from party X for 30 minutes on prime time, they also need to interview a candidate from party Y for 30 minutes on primetime' but that doesnt ensure the interviews themselves are even. It also has the danger of being biased towards unbiased content; by this i mean, there isn't always 2 equal sides to a story, sometimes there's 10, sometimes there's 1, sometimes there's none. If X party has 5 scandals a month, is the media then forced to report on 5 scandals by Y party even if they dont exist?

To avoid this messy area of forcing media companies to report a certain way, you could instead try introducing some legislation that provides a stop gap between the owner of a private media company and the content it produces. This way, theoretically, the actual journalists are free to report how they see fit without undue influence from either the government or their corporate owners. So even if the Murdochs, for example, own a certain news company, they can't actually influence the content. This would be very hard (maybe impossible?) to actually enforce, however.

What are peoples thoughts on the topic? What does theory say? Any reading recommendations?

I see a new post every single day of someone complaining that the region mechanic is bad and that they want to be able to combine them into one big giant region.

This is a bad idea if you think about it for more than a minute.

For starters, each single region is big enough to build the largest city the game can handle. You don't need the extra land for realestate, you need the extra land for the resources.

But the resources would be so spread out that travel times and logistics become a nightmare. The devs already tested that themselves. Hell sometimes when im playing, if there's a resource on the other side of my starting region that I don't absolutely need (like mushrooms or fish) I won't even extract it cause it's too far away from my population centre. And that's within a SINGLE region.

Now I know there are issues with the current mechanic, hopefully sometime soon it gets more fleshed out with better regional trade and maybe even semi-autonomous settings, but replacing the seperate region system with a combined system will not work.

In my opinion, the best short term fix is to allow the lord to purchase goods from other regions using the lords treasury. We already get to decide the starting resources of a new region in this same way, so it makes sense that we could get an option in the pack mule to send resources from X to Y region and in return X region receives money from the lords treasury.

I miss when games used to have single player campaigns. Like Warcraft and Age of Empires.

A recent post on here got me thinking about the peaceful campaign mode in Stronghold 2. I think Manor Lords would suit that kind of campaign mode a lot.

I know its a far away dream at the moment, the game still has a lot of development to go, but I'm talking about possibly post 1.0 additions.

At the moment i feel like there is a detachment between your countries internal policies and it's external conduct.

So should there be a new law for your countries foreign policy stance? Going from Imperialism to Isolationism (seperate to the Isolationist policy trade law)

Isolationism could prevent starting/joining most diplo plays and would restrict number of declared interests etc. But could give things like extra authority and maybe other bonuses like assimilation. (For countries like Japan and Korea)

Imperialism could allow extra declared interests and maybe reduced infamy for conquering unrecognized states but maybe results in higher radicals in unincorporated states. (For countries like GB, France, Netherlands)

And then a couple other laws in between, one close to Isolationism but not as extreme for countries like USA and Qing, maybe allowing declared interests in your own continent and conquering of states with a claim. And then one law close to Imperialism but not as extreme for countries like Prussia/Austria/Russia that maybe only restrict far away/overseas diploplays.

They could also tie into the new naval mechanics.

I think it might be nice to have some more connection between the internal politics and external diplomacy aspects of the game.

Plus as a bonus it might help to balance the behavior of some AIs, like preventing Russia from conquering minors in Indonesia.

This topic has been talked about to death so apologies for yet another post on the subject, I just always liked how Stronghold 2 handled this.

For those who never played - SH2 had a very similar setup to ML in that you would build your city in your first region then could claim secondary regions to utilize their resources. Just like in ML, these regions wouldn't be merged into your main region.

However, these regions would be run autonomously by the AI on your behalf reducing micromanagement. You could still build whatever you wanted in the region if you needed something specific, and you also had full control over the regions trade. I believe the region also paid a tax to you? (Not sure on that last point, it's been a while).

I think this is a good compromise between the current state of affairs and the people who want every region to be merged into one giant one.

It would certainly help a lot with reducing micromanagement which I think is the biggest drawback to the current system.

That always sat weird for me. Daniel didn't interact with the asgard as much as Sam and Sam even had a whole episode with them on her own (s4e1 Small Victories), an episode in which she directly saved the asgard home world by herself.

Rugby has changed in the last couple of years, more tries are scored per game, and i think 4 tries is now too easy of a target for a BP.

In the nations championship there has been at least 1 BP in every single game so far; 7 of the 12 nations have gotten 4 tries in both of their games, 2 have done it once, and only 3 nations have 0 BPs.

Thats 16 bonus points across the first two weeks. 16 out of a maximum of 24. (Not counting the losing BP, i think that ones fine.)

BP are supposed to be a bonus, a rarity.

I reckon 5 tries should be the target rather than 4. Even at 5 tries, you would still have 11 out of 24 BPs from the first 2 games, with 4 out of 12 nations getting both possible BPs.

So we just moved into a new flat in april and got our first quarterly bill from Origin Energy and it was a bit shocking.

$650 for a 2 person 2 bedroom flat? We didn't even use the heater for all of April and May!

This is our first time not having a gas connection but I checked our bills from the same time last year and it was about $250 for the same 3 months for both electricity and gas.

Is gas really that much cheaper than electricity?

The bill has a meter reading so it's not even an estimate from them, and $0 connection fee too.

Are we being ripped off??

Edit: theres a lot of comments so I'm just gonna update the main post.

To answer most people's questions - our usage is not very high. We cook every second day. In June we've had the heater on regularly but not too excessive. No dryer. We didn't even have a TV for the first 6 weeks.

People have been saying to check usage and tbf I should have before posting cause wtf... several issues with it. We started our billing period when we got the keys for this place on 27th March but we didn't actually move in until the 3rd April, but in that week before we moved in theres already about $50 worth of usage.

And I've checked the hourly usage and it makes no sense. About 50% of our total usage happens between 11pm and 1am... we're usually never awake that late...

So yeah, imma be calling Origin to see what's up.