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In regards to westerosi economic policy, would you think that oil would ever be a part of this universe and how that would effect westeros, particularly if it’s found in the north, like North Sea oil and in Dorne, like the opec nations.

Well, there’s a lot of technological and economic steps that have to be taken before petroleum is a particularly important economic substance. At the moment, it wouldn’t be that particularly useful because they don’t have the internal combustion engine, or a chemicals industry that could turn it into plastics, etc. 

what was Tywin’s plan if Eddard has gone after Clegane instead of Berric? he can’t actually know that Robert’s going to be assassinated, so isn’t luring the Hand of the King into an ambush just setting up a really elaborate way for the Lannister family to commit suicide?

That was his plan. He wanted to defeat and capture Eddard, force a prisoner transfer on unequal terms (symbolically humiliating the head of House Stark by equating him with Tyrion), and then hand Robert a fait accompli. 

Now what Tywin planned to do if Eddard caught an arrow and word got out that Tywin had murdered the Hand of the King and was now in open rebellion against the Iron Throne, I don’t know. But then again, Tywin was a monumentally arrogant man who didn’t really understand that the people around him would do things he didn’t foresee them doing. 

This might seem slightly random, but I read some of your thoughts on the election. I was performing a study, so I just wanted to know: in Civil War, if you have seen it, what team were you on and Why?

poorquentyn:

amthyst:

poorquentyn:

Team Cap, because a) he’s right b) I’m just more politically inclined toward Steve Rogers and his New Deal America than Tony Stark’s Great Man schtick c) he’s right d) morally, “your job is to plant yourself like a tree beside the river of truth” > “I didn’t stop because I didn’t want to stop” e) HE’S RIGHT. 

ok can you please explain to me how cap has the moral and political upper hand in his belief that he, an american soldier wrapped in the american flag who doubles as the public face for american defense, doesn’t have to justify his presence in other nations, doesn’t have to answer to any kind of authority – national or otherwise – and doesn’t have to face any kind of consequence if he leaves the nations he visits devastated, especially considering the us’ already very uncomfortable history with marching into other countries and causing deaths and ruin in the name of peace and freedom?

i mean idk if you’re american or not but the idea that cap can outright ignore the wishes of 117 countries and its people because he Knows What He’s Doing strikes me as arrogant at best and blatantly imperialistic at worst. i mean, cap has reason to mistrust authority, but a group of representatives from 117 countries is way more likely to act in the people’s interest than a group of superpowered people with no legal obligation to actually do the right thing.

correct me if i’m wrong, but the avengers in the mcu appear to be comparable to a type of military branch more than anything else, considering their job (to protect the people) and their access to military

personnel, facilities, equipment, etc. steve in particular is a person with military training, superhuman abilities, access to resources with offensive purposes, and seemingly a lot of legal and political leeway to do what he wants with all of these things.

you don’t get to “plant yourself like a tree beside the river of truth” and tell everyone else to move when you are in such a position of power; you have to listen to the people you’re serving. and as far as we’ve seen a lot of civilians – particularly non-western ones – are afraid of cap or see him as a fascist or want him to pay for the damage he and the other avengers have done to their homes.

even the things that are genuinely questionable about the accords – the lack of trial and severity of the prison come to mind – are details that could most likely be negotiated, because un legislations generally are amendable. but it’s pretty obvious that steve opposes oversight and authority over the avengers on principle; i mean aside from the fact that we know very little about the extent to which ross followed the accords – the raft wasn’t even mentioned in them iirc – take his “the safest hands are still our own,” or his “the un are people, they make mistakes.”

incidentally, these quotes also highlight another major flaw in steve’s reasoning: his point of view (and his plant-yourself-like-a-tree philosophy, for that matter) hinges on the assumptions that he is always right and that he will always act in the public interest. you don’t have to go any further than cacw to know that neither are true: he acts in bucky’s interest a majority of the film and some of his decision-making – such as not relaying the knowledge of the leftover winter soldiers or zemo being the vienna bomber to anyone else iirc – causes a lot of trouble that otherwise might’ve been avoided.

i mean i only saw cacw once and it was already over a month ago so it’s possible i misremembered some things but i’d seriously like to know how you came to the conclusion that cap being wrong is absolutely out of the question, like hmu with that logic

That the Avengers need oversight doesn’t change the fact that the oversight proposed was fatally flawed, and would make the situation worse. This, to widen the lens, is an issue I take with many of my fellow liberals: the idea that more gov’t oversight over private actors is an inherent good, without questioning whether that oversight is trustworthy given gov’t corruption and heinous agendas (including unjust wars, racist policing, etc.) 

I generally incline toward more gov’t regulation and oversight, but you have to watch the watchmen. Indeed, Watchmen showed us what happens when you do this wrong, and the Sekovia Accords is doing it wrong. You think it’s too dangerous to empower Captain America? Then why in the world are you advocating for empowering Thunderbolt Ross?

Since when are human rights like habeus corpus “details that could most likely be negotiated”?

The intended amounts of food cached for winter seem far too small relative to the populations they must support and uncertainty of winter’s duration. Does this suggest that the primary strategy is to buy food, with the winter stores as more of a backstop?

You raise a good question, and all I can say is 

GRRM seems to think it’s enough.

Well, that’s not exactly true, there’s a bunch more I can say: 

There’s an underlying world-building problem here, which is that the multi-year seasons don’t really make sense when you consider the ecology of the life cycle of flora and fauna. If winter was just unrelenting night and cold and nothing else, you’d expect 100% die-off as seeds wither in the frost and animals run out of plants to dig up from the snow. (Either that or there are some truly baroque evolutionary adaptions that you’d think we’d have heard about by now) Likewise, it doesn’t matter how much you store and how cool your cellars are, there are hard limits to how long you can store food in a pre-modern context. 

So the way that I’ve rationalized it is that the seasons are really closer to climate cycles than what we think of as seasons – summers are extended warm periods, winters are mini-ice ages. While agricultural productivity is going to be much much higher in the “summer” than in the “winter,” it’s not the case that there’s no growth at all during the winter.  

Because even within the “winter,” you’re going to get variation in temperatures – your “false springs” and “spirit summers” – that allow for short bursts of agriculture productivity. Those little bursts are vitally necessary to stretch out your supplies, replenish fodder for whatever livestock and game is still around, repair some of the damage done by malnutrition, etc. 

But I would imagine that those are very chancey – if the lull in the snows and the cold ends before you can harvest whatever crop you’ve been able to get into the ground, you’re going to lose it all. 

Why has no stark rebuild the moat cailin yet?

Because for the last 300 years, they’ve been a part of Westeros, so they haven’t needed it. And for a good long while before that, in no small part because everyone knew what had happened to the Andal armies that had tried to take the Moat, the North’s main threats have been the Wildlings coming down from off the Wall, the Ironborn off their west coast, and the Arryns and eastern pirates off their east coast, so Moat Cailin slipped down the list of priorities. 

The North’s Economic Development Plan

aspareme:

racefortheironthrone:

(for previous parts in the series, see here)

Of all of the regions of Westeros we’ve planned for, the North is perhaps the most difficult case we’ve deal with, next to Dorne (which had a much better export profile). 

As the Lord of Winterfell, my main difficulties are that the North is severely underpopulated, and has extreme weather conditions that exacerbate the northerly climate’s limits on agricultural productivity. 

So how do we overcome these problems…ideally, before winter comes?

Keep reading

This is brilliant–the idea of a canal system to connect the North is one I hadn’t considered, but it works.

Though–how would that be affected by the North’s sub-Arctic climate? Would a canal system be completed in the course of a summer?

The horse-breeding and emphasis on cavalry does make sense, though. You could also establish a policy of relative political isolationism–not totally, because trade will still be a necessity, but at the very least a policy of “don’t start none won’t be none” with the southern kingdoms, and then hold the line at the Neck.

Train your citizenry in what essentially amounts to guerrilla warfare, sort of like House Reed’s strike-and-disappear strategy, and you’d avoid the the Riverland’s’ problem of a helpless peasantry.

With the exception of the sections immediately adjacent to the existing rivers, digging a canal is basically digging a giant trench – it’s easier to do that during the summer, but you’re not limited to the summer. 

Now, one major drawback to a Northern canal is that it’s going to ice over in the winter – which is when you’d need to bring in the sleds – so a lot depends on the level of competition. If a Manderly-Blackwater or Blue Fork canal are active, the economic impact of a canal in the North is going to be severely hampered. 

In canals, tho, there’s a huge first-mover advantage. The Erie Canal wasn’t the shortest canal to the west, but because it was up and running before anyone else, it easily beat the pants off the competition, even after the arrival of the railroad potentially made it obsolete. 

How long would it take to build a city like KL in RL given roughly the resources Aegon I had and would this change depending on the layout (hub-and-spoke vs. grid)?

In real life, it kind of depends. To take London as an example, there have been periods of extremely slow growth and periods of outright decline – Roman London was 35,000 strong whereas it was down to 18,000 by the time of the Domesday Book – but there have also been periods of extremely rapid growth. For example, by the end of the 15th century, London was only 60-70.000 strong and by 1600 it was up to 250,000 residents, and by the end of the 17th century was up to 600,000. 

Hi, I love your economic development series! One thing that stuck out to me was the need for immigration in the north. The northerners just plain need more people to produce enough to be self sufficient AND trade competitive. Framing my question in a Post Dream/Post Second-Long-Night scenario, where the north as hit hardest but the south is also devastated, how would you (or Sansa Queen Of The North) repopulate the North? I assume some outreach to Essos would be necessary

I’ve talked about this a bit in my Northern economic development plan, but the foundation of any Northern immigration plan is going to have to be something akin to the German princes offering vacant land for free (as well as tax exemptions and other privileges) to anyone willing to settle in their lands after the Thirty Years War had depopulated entire regions.

We’re already starting to see that a little bit with the 100,000 willdings who just arrived, growing the North’s population by 2.5%, getting settled on the Gift. But, given its extremely low population density, the North is full of Gifts yet ungifted. 

In terms of where these people would come from, you’re going to want people who are already familiar with agriculture and livestock herding, so I would concentrate on the younger sons of landholding yeomen who aren’t going to inherit the family farm, as well as any and all peasants who don’t hold land (your crofters, your cotters, your sharecroppers, etc.). In so far as the North is also looking to industrialize, I would target journeymen and apprentices from the textiles industries of Myr, Tyrosh, Norvos, etc.