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I think Nationalism is really hard to pin on any one thing, and is due to a variety of factors which are hard to really pin down. You could say it's administrative regions, but Wales (& Scotland) prove having the same administration isn't enough. You could say it's being hated and...

Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't there a bridge that the Dutch planned to blow up but didn't because they thought the Allies would need it to get to them, and that ended up being the main bridge the Germans managed to capture and use?

Can you take this to another thread please? It's obvious that neither of you is going to convince the other, and I fail to see how it's relevant to the actual story, which is about WW2.

This is interesting. Not being an economist, I've learned a lot of what I know about LVT from Wikipedia, and I think I misunderstood it. For some reason I was confusing the rental surplus with the ROI from renting out the improved land on the market, so I was thinking it shouldn't be too much...

Hmm, I think we may have been vehemently agreeing with each other. I did assume your initial comments were directed at the concept of a LVT, rather than the specific implementation of the OP, and it seems I was wrong. In fact I noted in my initial post that 100% as a LVT is far too high. In the...

1. Reduce. Not eliminate. Saying that LVT is useless because a single city once attempted to implement it and it didn't magically solve every single issue they had with a global population interested in investing there is rather asinine. 2. Several modern economies implement a LVT and get along...

Uh... land value tax specifically reduces real estate speculation because buying land and then holding it in the hopes it will appreciate in value is much less profitable, because you now have to pay a tax for owning the land. The entire purpose of the tax is to encourage people to either sell...

Obviously there would be unpredictable butterflies, but if it proceeds close to OTL (WW1 etc) I think they would be worse off. After the defeat Russia embarked on reform of the army, and before WW1 was on track to being very strong by about 1918 or so. Indeed, that reform and upwards trajectory...

The rise to power of the Nazis owes more to the Great Depression than the ToV. While there was anger at the First World War and the results, until the Depression they weren't mainstream. Without such a thing it is likely the extremes of both sides end up far from power for far longer.

What was their reasoning for eliminating their own mobile reserve? Presumably it had to be a strong one, to commit such a basic error? The more I learn of the Battle of France, the more amazing it is the Germans won. Pretty much everything went right for them.

Thanks, good to know. Thinking back on it my education spent a lot of time teaching us about the lead up to the war, and very little on what actually happened in it. Anyway, I'm enjoying the timeline. Eager to see how things change in the BOF.

So it begins. Is the Saarland advance OTL? I don't remember learning about that.

From what I've read on the Schlieffen Plan, he actually probably never intended to use the OTL plan, the plan that bears his name was only considering fighting France and not Russia at the same time. Apparently in that event his idea was to sit back and defend against their attacks, then win the...

This talk reminds me of what I was reading in Hew Strachan's The First World War, where our current views of the war are actually fairly att odds with the immediate recollections of those who actually experienced it. As I recall, in Britain and France it wasn't until the end of the 20s that the...

There is no guarantee Philosophy and ideologies will go down the same roads anyway - unlike technology they're based more in people's minds than physical reality, and are therefore more influenced by cultural and specific factors.

@oca2073 you realise you can reply to more than one person in a post, right? Rather than double and triple posting all the time.

So regional military commanders will immediately realise the benefits and construct their own networks, but their boss, who they directly communicate with, won't? It's not like they didn't consider timely communication important to a degree, otherwise why construct the mail network they did...

I agree with the second part, large networks would require the Emperor. However I think once the incredible benefits are realised (cuts messages from a week to ten minutes) then the Emperor will definitely invest in certain very important lines and it will grow from there.

Something does not have to be monetized to benefit society. There's plenty of criticism of patent systems around, not least the overhead costs they cause which can mean poor inventors never get to patent something. And there are definitely those who refuse to patent something because they want...

The idea that Empires always stifle innovation is weird anyway - China has been an Empire of one Dynasty or another for most of its history and I don't see anyone claiming they weren't creative and inventive. Or the British Empire, which certainly produced many inventions. It's more of a...