Barely.

We can’t choose who we’re related to but we can absolutely choose not to talk to them ever again.

I trusted a family member.

They promised to let me rent the house I had grown up in until I have the money to buy it. At the beginning, I was still a university student with a part-time job so this quickly ate up my savings but I figured it was worth it. Then, about a year after I had finally finished university and had started working full time, they suddenly decided to set an ultimatum of about six months for me to buy the house or leave, even threatening to hire a gardener at my cost to make the property more attractive to buyers.

I pleaded, fought, tried to get a loan but of course without any savings as security, nobody would give me one. I had to move into an apartment, that’s smaller, older and more expensive than the house that had been my home for 23 years. While I’m not in debt, I still struggle to build up enough savings to get a loan for a home, even after eight years on a software engineer’s salary.

I’ve completely cut ties with that side of the family and I still occasionally have nightmares about the whole situation.

DB: “At least we’re not National Rail.”

National Rail: “At least we’re not Amtrak.”

The Creator

Yellowjackets

Psych

Upvote: well written, adds something to the discussion

Downvote: low effort, hurtful or rage bait

I make a point of not using downvotes as an “I disagree” button. If an opinion is presented well, it may still add something to the discussion even if it doesn’t match my personal preferences.

Do NOT, I repeat NOT do this. Someone very close to me did something similar and got irreversible brain damage that still shows itself years later in the form of epilepsy. Our brains are not made for that little sleep over long periods of time.

It’s easy to think that the Middle East is chaotic because of what’s going on now but the region was at peace for over 500 years under Ottoman Rule.

No doubt on that point.

But the Ottoman Empire ended a solid 30 years before Israel got established. To prevent the problems the region has now, different choices would have been necessary after WW1, not just WW2. For the purpose of a “What happens if WW2 ends differently” thread, that chance has already passed. The British Mandate has been established and there are already enough Jewish immigrants to have caused the 1936-39 Arab revolt and hundreds of thousands of Jews have already fled Europe. The Axis winning WW2 would probably put even more pressure on the Allies to let Jewish refugees live in Palestine because sending them back to Europe is not just an unattractive option, it’s outright impossible.

Literally every problem in the Middle East stems from the Zionist colony established by the imperialists

The Middle East has had problems for thousands of years before the state of Israel got established. Its strategic location between Africa and Asia caused Palestine to be conquered by the Egyptians, Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, European crusaders, Arabs again, Ottomans and the British Empire. Three major religions see Jerusalem as a sacred place and have fought wars over it.

Zionism is definitely a major reason for the problems we have in our timeline but assuming there would be no problems at all seems overly simplistic.

Also, the Axis winning the war does not guarantee that Israel won’t get established. There would still be hundreds of thousands of Jews who flee from Europe and need somewhere to live. The Axis, being the cause of the problem, wouldn’t be interested in solving it and the rest of the world has basically the same options as in our timeline.

The axis powers had no interest in the Middle East prior to 1939 and there’s no reason to believe they would start wars in the region if The Gulf Monarchies were willing to sell them oil.

I could very well see them trying to stay mostly neutral and selling oil to everyone. Profit is more important than ideology, especially if food and water are scarce. But even in real life, that hasn’t kept superpowers from finding excuses to attack oil-rich nations.

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

There are several events that might have had the possibility to turn the war:

• Germany doesn’t attack France at all, concentrating their forces in the east which gives the UK fewer reasons to join the war
• Japan doesn’t attack Pearl Harbor so the USA don’t join the war (yet)
• Operation Mincemeat fails and the Axis keeps their troops in Sicily, preventing the Allies from establishing a base in the Mediterranean.
• Axis spies uncover the plans for D-Day before it happens, Germany bombs the landing boats and thousands of Allied soldiers drown before they can reach land
• The Manhattan Project fails to produce a working nuclear bomb. Most of Germany and Italy has already fallen but Japan stays strong and can eventually send troops to Europe.

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.

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.

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.