dfyx @ dfyx @lemmy.helios42.de

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Thanks for the nice words. My approach was to avoid speculating too much about what might happen based on someone's ideology and instead see which real life events can't happen and extrapolate from there. This makes my answers equally plausible, no matter if the Axis powers stay fascist dictatorships or if they become more democratic over time, as long as overall alliances stay roughly the same.

Another thought is that American products and culture probably are popular partly because they were winners in World War 2.

Absolutely. American soldiers being stationed all over the world was fantastic PR. Being stationed long term, they brought along much of what they were used to in the USA. Those luxuries were traded with the locals and of course, if the locals wanted to be seen as fashionable, they just had to have those things.

On top of that, Jews fleeing from Europe would still need a place to live and there is a decent chance that the British would still give up Palestine to form Israel. Maybe a few years later and with a few details changed but overall not much of a difference.

Thanks, that's exactly the point I wanted to get across. You found way better words than I ever could.

SPRICH

Hard to say. I'm not a historian, so I can only speculate. I would assume that Hitler would eventually select a successor and there is no way of telling how good that person would be at keeping the Reich in order.

comparable to say Soviet communism’s collapse in the real world

As far as I understand it, the fall of the Soviet Union was preceded by at least a decade of economic struggle that was caused by a multitude of factors. Basically the only thing they had to export was oil and weapons and the only nations they could trade with were relatively poor. When their oil production cost kept rising, they just couldn't keep their exports high enough to import enough food and luxury goods to keep their population happy. This was a prime driver for unrest in regions that bordered the west, especially East Germany who of course got news of what life in West Germany was like. The Soviets were eventually forced to open the Berlin Wall and from there, there was nothing they could do to keep people from just leaving and fully collapsing the economy in the process. To this day, 35 years after the reunion, former East Germany is way behind the rest of the country even though on paper they have the same chances as everyone else, just because there has been a massive brain drain.

So overall, the collapse of the Soviet Union was less a failure of communism itself and more a failure to counteract their economic weaknesses as well as a result of their isolationism. The USA didn't win the Cold War because of the inherent superiority of capitalism but because the world drinks Coca Cola, wears jeans, watches Hollywood movies and works with IBM-compatible PCs. If the Soviet Union had pivoted their economy to those kinds of goods and had managed to export them to the west, they might have become what China is today.

So it all comes down to the question if alternate-history Germany manages to do that. With technology advancing slower overall and therefore becoming less of a factor in global markets, and at the same time keeping a lot of top scientists who in the real world left for the other superpowers, they could probably do it.

I imagine that we would be more scientifically advanced

Much of the scientific advances in the second half of the 20th century were driven either directly or indirectly by the Cold War:

• rockets were first developed to deploy nuclear warheads, then to deploy spy satellites and eventually to demonstrate technological superiority
• computers were needed to calculate rocket trajectories
• the internet was developed to connect defense systems in the event of incoming nuclear missiles, either to launch countermeasures quickly or to stay in contact if the surface gets uninhabitable

Without two super powers of similar strength who have access to both nuclear bombs and rockets, all of this would happen way more slowly and the main reason why the USA and Soviet Union developed rockets at a similar pace was because they both employed German rocket scientists after the war. Without this, there would be no space race, just slow and steady progress of one power who can then keep everyone else from catching up.

Let's assume that the Axis winning the war means they keep all territory they've had at the height of their expansion in our timeline but don't expand much more, at least not immediately.

• The EU does not exist but as most of Europe is either occupied by Germany or allied with it, there might be a similar organization with a way stronger Germany at its center.
• If a NATO-like alliance forms, it excludes most of Europe, mainly consisting of the USA, Canada and UK, maybe Spain and Portugal
• The Soviet Union is way weaker than in our timeline with most of Eastern Europe being under German control. They still have control over Central Asia, probably more than in our timeline.
• The Allies still control Gibraltar and are able to intercept ships passing through the English Channel, making the west of France the only safe access to the Atlantic for the Axis.
• Wernher von Braun and other rocket scientists stay in Germany, giving the USA and Soviet Union a massive disadvantage in the development of ICBMs. The USA may have nuclear bombs but their only way to threaten Germany with them would be UK-based bombers which are way slower and easier to defend against. On the other hand, a failure of the Manhattan Project might be the whole reason why the Axis wins the war. Everyone will figure it out eventually but as we see from real life, it might take decades.
• No proper cold war as there are no two super powers exercising mutually assured destruction with ICBMs but probably ongoing tensions along the German-Soviet border. The USA probably stays out of it to avoid becoming a target for either side.
• Italian East Africa (Somalia) becomes the most important rocket launch site in the world, as it is the only Axis-controlled territory that is close to the equator and has open ocean to the east. Some smaller rockets may launch from Japan. French Guiana might be under Axis control but shipping rockets over the Atlantic is dangerous when they could get intercepted by foreign ships. Without competition, manned spaceflight develops a lot slower, maybe not at all.
• Without manned spaceflight and the threat of a nuclear war, there is less incentive to develop computers and the internet.

It will cost billions if not trillions. But that money goes into the pockets of rich people so it's okay.

A pretty good but not fantastic camera or lens

Definitely Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds, an RTS in the Star Wars universe that uses the Age of Empires 2 engine and has very similar gameplay.

This photo perfectly summarizes most of my Mastodon mutuals.

Absolutely and it has done so for over a decade. Not LLMs of course, those are not suitable for the job but there are lots of specialized AI models for medical applications.

My day job is software development for ophthalmology (eye medicine) and people are developing models that can, for example, detect cataracts in an OCT scan long before they become a problem. Grading those by hand is usually pretty hard.

It always baffles me that this is considered a luxury in the USA while in Germany (and I assume most of Europe) this is the absolute standard. Stalls where the door doesn't lock properly or where the indicator on the outside is faded so that you can't reliably determine if it's occupied are already considered signs of bad maintenance. Gaps that you can look through without pressing your face right against them would be a "nope, I'll never visit this place again" level scandal.

Maybe, just maybe, instead of testing out new logos, they should test providing search results that are actually useful. With Google becoming more enshittified every day, going in the opposite direction would actually give them a chance to become the new number one in the search engine market, at least for less technically inclined people who don't know about the alternatives. But who am I kidding? That will never happen.

You mean Godwin's Law. I think Crenshaw's Law is the one about Nazis.

Edit: aaaand someone didn't get the joke.

I only found out about E.V.O. way later, probably around 2005 when a friend made a web game that combined its evolution theme with gameplay similar to Legend of the Green Dragon. I still wonder why E.V.O. wasn't more popular. It's an amazing game, I still occasionally play it on my Analogue Pocket.

I would say Age of Empires 2 which was where I first used the name that I still have on here, over 25 years later. Its amazing editor also resonated with my urge to create my own games without requiring programming knowledge that I just didn't have at 11 years old. I went on to create custom content for Warcraft III, Neverwinter Nights and Morrowind, eventually studied computer science and joined some indie gamedev communities where I made a lot of friends, some of whom I still meet in person once or twice a year. I never became a full time game developer but I worked on some stuff part time in the mid 2000s and still do it as a hobby.

Why this NSFW?

Because Lemmy doesn't have a different kind of content warning. Some people get really nervous or even depressed by the massive amount of bad news floating around the world and just want a couple of minutes of funny memes to unwind. It's just polite to mark such things, especially when posting them in communities that are usually reserved for more lighthearted content.

Edit: okay guys. Someone has to explain to me why this is getting downvoted. Is it factually incorrect? Is it rude? Or does it hurt your feelings that some people use the fediverse differently than you do?

I wouldn't be surprised if there was a whole generation for whom loss is the "hide some lines in your posts" meme and who have never even seen the original comic let alone know who Tim Buckley is.