It is possible that because there are so many holidays, people tend to assume they're taken off.

It may also have something to do with how many school districts have off on various different holidays (Columbus day being the first one to come to mind?), and people from other countries apply that to adults, even though workplaces do not give paid off-days for those occasions..? I'm just guessing here, though.

Regardless of what we may think of it personally, Columbus Day is still one of our 10 federal holidays. Some states choose to not observe it anymore.


Really? I use Age but not Grow and find that even in my most populated worlds with what I would call plenty of older Adults and younger Elders the pause at 1 am is barely noticeable. I'm going to have to try Grow one of these days and see how that goes, but even if a nightly one second pause doubles or triples in length that's not much of a concern. And my system is only midrange at best; I wonder why these mods have such a heavier impact for others also on at least suitable hardware.

I'm pretty sure I never changed any default settings on this one, in fact my eyes glaze over in awe every time I look at the possibilities. I did exempt one resident mummy because the mod didn't like her for whatever reason. My central world, Riverview, with around 260 residents now...not sure the town total would really be at or over 1,000, that sounds really high to me, but I can take a closer look at the demographics and NPC counts/ages the next time I load it up. It's possible you have quite a lot more sims overall for the mod to cope with nightly than I do once we get past counting the residents.

I've never had problems with Consort's Grow+Age composition, yeah sometimes there's a bit of lag when the game updates sims' skeletons, though the Nraas Security Police produces sometimes a lot more, like 3-6 seconds more. Depends of the world, (real) Moon phase, how borked the game became at that specific moment etc.

Though my towns rarely have more than 200 alive sims (service included) and many of standard ones I just do not generate (paparazzis, seasonal service/role sims, horses, game etc) or disallow to appear at all (ghosts, zombies, magicians & other menage).

I imagine, with a source code at hand it should not be that hard to add option for updating sims in smaller groups instead of whole town at once.

WHat concerns me more is inability to autogroup sims by certain criteria - i like to have separated schools for kids in different age semi-stages (small kids, kids in regular elementary schools, younger teens and "full teens" with public/paid division,* a bit of a mess), or groups for sims with particular "classes" (which are allowed or not to gather at some places like clubs, perform certain activities and such) but all of this must be done manually.

However said functionality would be - especially if abused which I'd certainly do - another lag factory.

*which efectively means I have "tweens" ingame, as long as I remember to update theirs castes.

Didn't know you guys had a labor movement as well. Makes sense though, the free market tends to be a little eager to keep increasing those profit margins as long as the common man isn't pushing back. And in America the call of the almighty Dollar is a tad stronger than it's ever been over here, so you guys have more pushing back to do as well. I assume they fought for the abolition of child labor, increased living conditions in newly built residences and 8-8-8 working days?

I've never heard of that stereotype by the way. I've worked with a bunch of Americans and while none of them have been miracle workers, they haven't seemed to difficult either. Not very focused maybe, and a little eager to complain about the higherups, but that hardly seems representative of the general population. I know our general policy here is, you work hard and then you go home and you relax hard. Work and leisure are two entirely separate things and that means we don't take siestas or close up shop for lunch. Being a protestant culture though, everything's closed on Sundays so we can all go and praise the baby Jesus in church. Religion is in the minority nowadays and that makes it kind of a has-been thing but on Sundays, we rest. Also, good luck trying to get anything to eat, drink or smoke after 10. Unless you like McDonalds you're not going to find any place that can be bothered to remain open into the night.

Nothing personal, but sometimes I wonder how American History is taught in other countries, or if it's even covered much. Certainly not with the same depth as it is here, that would not be expected. But not knowing we even had/have a Labor Movement is kind of like not knowing we had a Declaration of Independence or a Civil War and what the results and repercussions were of each. And sometimes I think maybe we (and by "we" I mean those who lived here at the time as like most Americans today I have no direct connection to them) should have just paid our stupid tax on tea and kept quiet about it all instead of throwing it into the harbor.

I'd be kind of surprised if nothing is open after 10 or on Sundays in Amsterdam, but maybe that part applies more to the rest of the country.

Sorry for wandering so far off topic, but except maybe for the Grow/Age mod pains this one seems to have kind of exhausted itself by now.

I had half a chapter on American independence in my history classes, out of maybe 30-40 chapters a year, times 4. America makes cameos earlier on as "that place we colonized" and later on as "that place that makes all those really neat movies". Since we were a colonial empire there was quite some attention spent on our ventures in New Amsterdam and the other Dutch colonies, and Dutch colonialism - both before and after 1776 - probably took up at least 20 chapters. Then eventually as we move on to the post-industrial era we kind of stop being the most influential culture in our own world, so the book slowly starts running out of interesting Dutch-themed knowledge. There's now more of a focus on whatever those crazy Americans are up to. After World War II it turns into a big mess of space race, yadda yadda, rock 'n' roll (look at what he's doing with his hips! The pervert!), yadda yadda, Hollywood, pop music, miniskirts, oh shit here's some hippies, look at them smoke, MTV, hahahaha guys look at this dumb stain on Gorbachev's head, some crap about action movies (fuck yeah Commando) and the sheer obscenity of modern music (providing this example). And for the sake of staying current they also make some mention of 9/11. It happened just last week, but we're pretty sure it's to become highly relevant in the coming years.

And yeah now that you mention it, there might've been mentions of those silly Americans and their fights. But the basics of American history are more or less common knowledge anyway, so a history book isn't going to go out of its way to elaborate on it. Everyone knows who George Washington is, why you guys revolted against the British, why the Civil War happened and some other crap like that. You're the country that, apparently, exists only to provide the rest of the world with entertainment and overpriced goods. So if anyone ever feels like brushing up on US history they'll just put on a Clint Eastwood movie or Saving Private Ryan or whatever. That's the gist of it. We're here doing our very sensible things very sensibly while the rest of the world goes out of its way to provide us with stuff we like, like cheap labor or cheap junk food or cheap action movies. Or really expensive designer smartphones.

I don't really know about the Amsterdam thing. Amsterdam isn't very relevant, they just sort of do their own thing and it doesn't always have a whole lot in common with what the greater Dutch nation is doing. They keep trying to get us to give a crap about their drama, but it hasn't really worked so far. The foreigners are rave about it, we hear, and that's okay as long as they stay well within the Amsterdam city limits. We want their money, not them. So we just kind of sit and point and laugh as those silly underdeveloped foreigners slowly turn Amsterdam into a city-sized theme park. It's okay; we speak glibberish. No we're not making fun of you at all, keep emptying those wallets please. (Side note: Americans are actually the best kind of tourists. They're never rude, they're not particularly entitled, they seem very eager and understanding, and they speak English pretty well. Keep the fuck up, rest of the world.)

Anyway that's a long and windy answer to a pretty straightforward question. Not really relevant to the topic but it has the potential to go somewhere other than nowhere like the rest of this thread. Do I sound too cynical for you guys? I met a new coworker today, he told me to work on the whole cynicism thing. And if some greasy, bald American dude in cargo shorts and a bandana on his head tells you to be more cynical about the world, why in the fresh hell wouldn't you? That guy is just about the best sort of person you can reasonably hope to become.

Our country was an experiment in setting up a republic with democracy-like features on a scale that had never been attempted before. One would think that the results of that and what has really happened since 1776 (or really since 1783) thus far might be of enough interest and relevance to the rest of the world to warrant more than a half-chapter per year, but maybe that's just me. Or maybe that just comes with the more advanced uni-level classes.

Well we have had quite a lot happen in Europe and the rest of the world since then too.

Yeah, I don't really see why a mildly unsuccessful attempt at creating a new kind of society would at all be more relevant than our own, existing, perfectly functional one. I guess it kind of ties into the whole "overinflated sense of self-importance" thing that some global powers and national capitals seem to suffer from. It's very easy to go from "we're kind of important" to "we're one of the constants of modern civilization".

America was a topic in social sciences as well, though, as there's a certain historic angle to the nature of societies. The idea is that they dissect our welfare state by comparing it to other types of societies. China's capitalist-friendly communism, Russia's Putinist Putinism, the UK's "oh god it's all gone wrong" Toryism, and America's "fuck you, I got mine" policies. We have what's called the "participatiesamenleving", where we're responsible for our own affairs but make an active effort to be selfless. Basically libertarianism but with 0% sugar. I guess there's still an element of old-school imperialism present in the way we look at ourselves because even in our aforementioned school curriculum there's undertones of "we're not better than them, but they're worse than us". It's a bit of old-world arrogance that still persists in a limited capacity, and only occasionally is there a push to rid ourselves of it. Suddenly, for example, a statue of a 17th century naval hero is no longer a statue of a heroic patriot, but of a genocidal maniac who enslaved entire populations in the quest for profit margins. And there was profit, alright, so much profit even that we're still banking on the interest 300 years later, but now the rest of it is catching up as well. It's well-known that Europe is responsible for much of Africa's plight and a lot of our history there stems from the idea that we would go there to "improve" the native population. Oftentimes it laid the basis for their modern societies, but at great costs. We owned Indonesia for 300 years, and didn't grant it independence until 1949. It helped them a lot in the end, and the bad blood is history, but they seem to be managing quite well on their own level. It's a bit like how our remaining colonies (that are wholly part of the Kingdom) have embarassingly poor living conditions. But how are you going to bring up these small Caribbean city states to the level we're at? It would be unimaginably expensive to bring those places up to the same technological and economical standards we're used to at home. Last I heard we're still sending them money, and we're also helping former colonies like Suriname by sending them goods and resources. They get our old police vehicles, our city buses, used computers, stuff like that.

So all I have to say for that particular issue is that we're still more important to us than any other country is. The Americans in particular are a global force not to be reckoned with, especially culturally, but economically we have them solidly by the balls. Every year we spend about 4 trillion USD (not an economics expert but math says that's well over $200,000 per capita) of our savings on countries like the United States and create tens of thousands of jobs. We more or less invented market capitalism as we know it, so it makes sense that we've kept up. Ultimately economics are the key to political power, because if you can pull your billions out of someone else's economy you can hurt them where it counts. So in terms of soft power per capita, if you will, we're not only more important to ourselves, we're more important to the rest of the world as well. We've been known to easily outperform countries with 5 times the population.

It also wasn't a half-chapter per year, it was just one half-chapter, period. And then some other mentions of it kind of sprinkled around the history books. A mention of the founding fathers here, an anecdote about the automobile there, and maybe a picture of the moon landing thrown in. I don't recall exactly what was and wasn't in those books.

Anyway is it just me or weren't we talking about this originally?

I wasn't looking to take over your secondary school curriculum in any way or question its relevance. I just thought this little experiment of ours, its results thus far, and to go with it the distinct lack of a centuries ago history of royal rule and rigidly defined strata like serfs and lords (or the equivalent by other names) holding things back at one time, as well as any possible adaptations of what we have learned over here and avoidance of some horrible mistakes we have made along the way, might have been interesting enough to capture a bit more placement among the core material.

That and you guys are setting yourselves up for generations of students thinking that John Adams signed the Magna Carta and President Carter invented peanut butter. Guess that's not truly important, but we have enough geniuses who think those things must be true over here.

Well you found your way towards a modern society. You created a new system of government in a time when Europe was still ruled by all-powerful kings who were only beginning to be questioned by the people. The French revolution didn't happen for 13 years after the United States was founded, and our constitution wasn't finalized until 1848. So maybe you guys did it first, but in the long run it hasn't worked out particularly well. I think other countries have since done it better, because you guys experimented with modern democracy and have been having a few issues with it ever since. So we eventually transitioned our old forms of government, our kings and queens and lords, and we turned them into a ceremonial thing where the actual decisionmaking is done by a congress and a senate elected through a representative democracy. You guys have the two-party system, we have a dozen parties. And none of them ever gets more than about a fifth of the seats, so they're forced to work together to form a majority. And that keeps our politics grounded in relative sanity.

I don't think Australia has ever had a civil war or a massive polarizing divide between two halves of the population. I can't explain why but it seems to me that they were less ambitious to create the perfect society, as George Washington and John Adams and all their buddies had attempted to, and it seems to have worked out better for them in the long run. Also, who's the guy who got struck by lightning again? Was that Ben Franklin? He was never president though, right? And how about my boy Martin van Buren, the Dutch-American president who even didn't bother to start speaking English until after he got elected? Imagine that nowadays!

No, they could've been doing a better job themselves too, but we did kind of ruin much of it for them. Had it not been for us, Africa would have been in a much better position. And it continues as we speak. The Americans have taken over that centuries-old tradition very well by cheating and lying to keep the Middle East destabilized and angry. Iran is still considered armed and dangerous despite evidence to the contrary. Wars continue to be waged over other wars that have made everyone very angry in the past, which in turn inspires new wars which by themselves inspire YET MORE new wars and from the looks of it, it's not going to end anytime soon.

But guys, this is not the kind of discussion we should be having here. If we should have it at all, let's do it somewhere more appropriate. But preferably, let's get back on topic.

Good heavens, see this is why the secondary school curriculum...ahh, forget it.

We did it first and we did it more loudly than others. It's what we do. The system has scaled well and works better than it doesn't, although some elements of it like the Electoral College are now in need of refinement. I would not say that our experiment was a failure, but do check back in another 300 years and we'll revisit. Thanks for your assessment in the meantime, though.

Franklin was the dude with the kite and electricity, yes. He never ran for president, he was older than most of our Founding Fathers and passed away soon into Washington's first term. Van Buren spoke English as a second language, he held many offices before that of president. Wouldn't say he was the most effective leader we ever had, but can see why you would have some affection for him.

Edit: The thing is, we don't like the intended topic very much anymore and kind of already discussed it to death.

True, screw the intended topic.

I'm not saying that the American system is a failure but it has ups and downs and those ups and downs are more significant than our system's. Even if the whole US government doesn't do a massive flipflop every 4 years, it'll do one every 8. Our politics are pretty consistent in being mediocre, but the end result is a government that is generally mostly functional because none of these politicans have the power to really effect any lasting changes. These politicians of ours are all stuck between Obama (center right) and Bernie Sanders (center left), basically, and there isn't that other half of the population that's eager to do the exact opposite thing just to "piss off the liberals". The liberals are in charge here, they have been for god knows how long, and they're very consistent on being center right. If I remember correctly there's 3 mainstream political movements: the socialists on the left, the Christians in the middle, and the liberals on the right. There's also a few of those far-right people but they have a tendency of getting sued into oblivion, every time they come out of the woodworks to spread their far-right rhetoric.

Back on the game matter, young adults could have been apart of adults by stretching the age span length.