Ever since the Defense Department procurement scandals of the 1980s, the $600 hammer has been held up as an icon of Pentagon incompetence. Immortalized in the "Hammer Awards" that Vice President Al Gore's program to reinvent government gives out to waste-cutters, this absurdly overpriced piece of hardware has come to symbolize all that's wrong with the government's financial management.
One problem: "There never was a $600 hammer," said Steven Kelman, public policy professor at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government and a former administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy. It was, he said, "an accounting artifact."
The military bought the hammer, Kelman explained, bundled into one bulk purchase of many different spare parts. But when the contractors allocated their engineering expenses among the individual spare parts on the list-a bookkeeping exercise that had no effect on the price the Pentagon paid overall-they simply treated every item the same. So the hammer, originally $15, picked up the same amount of research and development overhead-$420-as each of the highly technical components, recalled retired procurement official LeRoy Haugh. (Later news stories inflated the $435 figure to $600.)
"The hammer got as much overhead as an engine," Kelman continued, despite the fact that the hammer cost much less than $420 to develop, and the engine cost much more-"but nobody ever said, 'What a great deal the government got on the engine!' "
Thus retold, the legend of the $600 hammer becomes a different kind of cautionary tale. It is no longer about simple, obvious waste. The new moral is that numbers, taken as self-explanatory truths by the public and the press, can in fact be the woefully distorted products of a broken accounting system.
The root of the problem is as old as the Republic: Federal accounting has always been primarily concerned with making sure money was spent as Congress directed-not with making sure it was spent wisely. Historically, explained the Pentagon's deputy chief financial officer, Nelson Toye, DoD's bookkeeping systems were designed to "be able to satisfy the Congress that we were good stewards of the funds entrusted to us: We didn't overspend, we did spend it on what you asked us to, we didn't spend money to buy things you told us we couldn't buy." In the past, Toye said, "there has not been a requirement for DoD or any federal agency to routinely collect the costs of its assets and report those costs."
But a necessary change is under way, said Richard Eckhardt, deputy director of financial management for the Air Force Materiel Command, which does most of that service's shopping. "We've been very good at putting budgets together and writing budget justifications," he noted, "but in an era of declining budgets, we have to understand what our costs are." That means government must borrow business techniques to track the true costs of its activities.
The Air Force Materiel Command, for example, has broken its activities into eight "business areas"-from base upkeep to information systems to flight testing-and assigned to each a general as "chief operating officer." These generals, said Eckhardt, are "in different stages of developing cost-accounting systems"; of devising numerical measures for output (always difficult for the government, which doesn't sell anything); and of experimenting with "activity-based costing," a popular private-sector technique that pulls business processes apart to find the cost of every step.
Bookkeeping based on congressional appropriations makes such cost-finding immensely difficult. Functions that in practice are inextricably intertwined are often paid for by totally separate line items in the budget. New weapons are bought with one "color of money," existing weapons are maintained with another, and the personnel who operate them are paid with a third. In fact, to save administrative costs, military salaries and pensions are all paid from one central office. As a result, said Eckhardt, among commanders "there's a tendency to view military labor as free, because you're not making any expenditures from your installation [budget] to pay those people."
The National Reconnaissance Office, which runs satellites, has an even more confusing payroll: Some of its personnel belong to the CIA, some to various military services, some to the office itself-and each of these contingents is paid with a separate appropriation. The office used to use three incompatible accounting systems, too, but after 1995-96, when investigators found $4 billion languishing unspent in various accounts, it has introduced a unified system, using standard Momentum software from American Management Systems Inc. Vincent Dennis, deputy director for resource oversight and management, crowed that for the first time in the agency's history, "in March of '99, we will have an auditable financial statement." Even so, he admitted, with salaries coming out of three different congressional appropriations, "I'm not at the position where I can allocate those personnel costs."
Personnel is not the only cost arbitrarily broken up by the DoD's line-item budget. Many warships, planes, and other weapons systems depend on critical components-such as radars and anti-missile jammers-that were developed under separate programs financed by separate line items. Whether those subsystems are counted as part of the larger system's cost depends on what the meaning of cost is.
"There are all types of costs," said the Pentagon's Toye, "and people need to be specific when they ask." A Tomahawk cruise missile, the kind that occasionally lands on an Iraqi target, costs about $750,000--if bought new in 1998, now that years of manufacturing experience have driven down the price. Any missile actually fired today, however, was bought at a higher price earlier in the production run, and has been stored, serviced and shipped across the seas, making for a total cost, by some estimates, of nearly $2 million a missile.
Conversely, said defense analyst Loren B. Thompson of the Lexington Institute, a conservative Arlington, Va., think tank, the $2 billion-per-plane figure cited by opponents of the B-2 stealth bomber includes the program's high research and development expenses--which must be spread over only 21 planes--plus spare parts, maintenance and future inflation. Said Thompson: "What would it cost me to build one more bomber? . . . $700 million."
Interpretations, admitted Toye, compound the problem: "It is indeed possible to go into two different program offices, and use the same terminology, and come out with some components in, or some components out, that weren't treated that same way in a different office." In other words, different agencies may apply the same technical definition of cost to the same weapon and come up with different numbers.
Under whatever definition, a weapon's cost rarely reflects the expenses of the headquarters that supervised its development, since those administrative offices are funded under their own line items. And many administrative offices, in turn, depend on support services--such as legal counsel and computer support-that are themselves financed by separate appropriations and are therefore often ignored in computations of a given office's cost of doing business. Unlike the private sector, said the Kennedy School's Kelman, "the government, in its own internal cost accounting, . . . typically doesn't fully account for overhead; sometimes it doesn't account at all for overhead."
"How do you allocate the cost of carrying inventory, for example?" asked John W. Douglass, recently retired assistant Navy secretary for research, development and acquisition. "Generally speaking, the service only pays the price of [buying] the part in their cost models. They don't show the cost of carrying that inventory."
Such accounting arcana are bread-and-butter issues for Douglass now that he heads the Aerospace Industries Association of America Inc., whose members want more military service contracts-which they can win only by showing they can perform a given service at lower cost than the military could do it in-house. But when the public and private sectors compete, said Bert M. Concklin, president of the Professional Services Council, differing accounting standards mean that "the government's costs are elusive, at best."
The Air Force Materiel Command conducts many such competitions, said Eckhardt, and it uses Pentagon and Office of Management and Budget guidelines to "take all those sources of overhead [and] make sure all the costs are included." The OMB's competition guidelines, for instance, start by accepting most federal cost estimates and then add on an estimated overhead rate. But the Pentagon's true overhead "may be more or less than the government rate," fretted Lisa G. Jacobson, director of Defense audits in the accounting and information management division of the General Accounting Office. "DoD's business operation seems to be very inefficient, in general."
Jacobson felt so strongly about Defense's inefficiencies that she took the unusual step of testifying, not as a GAO representative but as a private citizen, before the Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board. She was hoping--vainly--to have the board require the Defense Department to report the price it initially pays for any given piece of equipment, implementing a common private-sector standard called "historical cost."
"I don't pretend that we have precise historical costs," said Toye, who represents the Pentagon on the accounting advisory board. "After six years and three months, we are [free to discard] records [of particular purchases]. But in terms of meaningful cost information, reasonable cost information, I believe we have that."
"I don't know how Nelson Toye can give you that data [on cost information]," complained one Senate aide. In an investigation of military books, he said, "we couldn't find most of the records"--not just records of transactions more than six years and three months old, but "of things that were just paid, or of things that hadn't been paid yet." And if the basic records are in such disarray--if the Pentagon cannot even account for the true cost of a hammer--then, critics warn, any attempt to install sophisticated commercial accounting will be a castle built on sand.
"I would disagree," countered Toye, "with the statement that there isn't hard, actual, auditable data out there. I believe it's there [even if] the department may not be able to summarize that and report it in ways that individuals want us to." The problem for the Pentagon is that those "individuals" of Toye's are the citizens.
Jost: The Republican candidate for president owes half a billion in fines for bank fraud and is currently spending his days farting himself awake during a porn star hush money trial and the race is tied? The race is tied. Nothing makes sense anymore. pic.twitter.com/59FRR2Hc3S
Two things: The bizarre and shocking facts above — or more precisely, the facts that would be shocking if we retained the ability to be shocked, which we clearly don’t — are far, far down the list of reasons to be horrified by the prospect of Trump’s second seizure of the presidency.
Donald Trump continues to hold an advantage over President Joe Biden as the campaign – and the former president’s criminal trial – move forward, according to a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS. And in the coming rematch, opinions about the first term of each man vying for a second four years in the White House now appear to work in Trump’s favor, with most Americans saying that, looking back, Trump’s term as president was a success, while a broad majority says Biden’s has so far been a failure.
Trump’s support in the poll among registered voters holds steady at 49% in a head-to-head matchup against Biden, the same as in CNN’s last national poll on the race in January, while Biden’s stands at 43%, not significantly different from January’s 45%.
Looking back, 55% of all Americans now say they see Trump’s presidency as a success, while 44% see it as a failure. In a January 2021 poll taken just before Trump left office and days after the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, 55% considered his time as president a failure.
Assessing Biden’s time in office so far, 61% say his presidency thus far has been a failure, while 39% say it’s been a success. That’s narrowly worse than the 57% who called the first year of his administration a failure in January 2022, with 41% calling it a success. . . .
Negative views of Biden’s work in office have held for much of his presidency. In the new poll, 60% disapprove of his handling of the job and 40% approve, about the same as it’s been in CNN polling for more than a year. Even Biden’s strongest issue approval ratings in the poll are also in negative territory, with 45% approving of his handling of health care policy and 44% approving his handling of student loan debt. And his worst issue approval rating – for his handling of the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza – yields 28% approval to 71% disapproval, including an 81% disapproval mark among those younger than 35 and majority disapproval among Democrats (53%). . . .
A broad majority of all Americans, 70%, say economic conditions in the US are poor, with many, particularly Republicans, who feel that way saying their views would be more affected by a political shift than a change in the economy itself. About 4 in 10 in that group (41%) say that a change in political leadership in Washington would do more to change their impressions of the economy than a lower rate of inflation, a change in their personal financial situation or a sustained rise in the stock market. About 6 in 10 Republicans (61%) who say the economy is in bad shape say a change in leadership would shift their views, compared with 13% of Democrats who feel that way.
After politics, a decline in the rate of inflation could change the minds of a sizable share of those who feel the economy is in bad shape – 37% feel that way, with far fewer citing a positive change in their personal finances (14%) or a rise in the stock market (3%) as having that same effect.
Americans’ perceptions of their own finances also remain negative, with 53% saying they are dissatisfied with their personal financial situation while 47% are satisfied.Dissatisfaction is starkly prevalent among those with lower incomes (67% dissatisfied in households with annual incomes lower than $50,000), people of color (64% say they are dissatisfied) and younger Americans (61% of those younger than 45 say they are dissatisfied).
There’s a lot to digest here, but for now I want to focus on what remains the best reason for optimism: This is only a snapshot of public sentiment six months before an election. Most people, including most voters, pay almost no attention to politics, and as a consequence are astoundingly uninformed about what, to a politically aware and engaged person, seem like the most basic possible facts.
It follows from this that their ideas about Donald Trump are nothing but vague memories of things that happened years ago, while their ideas about Joe Biden are literally a function of the fact that nominal food and gas prices are much higher than they were four years ago.
> A broad majority of all Americans, 70%, say economic conditions in the US are poor, with many, particularly Republicans, who feel that way saying their views would be more affected by a political shift than a change in the economy itself. About 4 in 10 in that group (41%) say that a change in political leadership in Washington would do more to change their impressions of the economy than a lower rate of inflation, a change in their personal financial situation or a sustained rise in the stock market
Saturday morning, 10am, and I’m sitting at a café table on a cobbled street in the Beşiktaş neighbourhood of Istanbul, sipping a glass of çay (Turkish tea) and waiting for breakfast. By the café entrance, a plump, grey-haired man in a crisp white apron is sharpening a knife, before slicing through what is generally acknowledged to be the largest doner kebab in Turkey. The kebab weighs 100kg, a meaty monster slowly cooking from the outside in. Our guide, Sinan, tells us that Black Sea (Karadeniz) doners from this area are always the best – all of it will be gone by mid-afternoon.
Istanbul is a city that runs on its stomach. It may be steeped in history, but the best way to understand this multi-layered melting pot of east and west, Ottoman and Byzantine, is undoubtedly through its food. I’m lucky enough to be spending a couple of days with Cenk Debensason, recently awarded a Michelin star for his restaurant, Arkestra. The chance to discover the city through his eyes – and taste buds – promises a different version of Istanbul.
After breakfast, instead of following the well-trodden tourist trail to the historic district of Sultanahmet, we head north to Bebek, a leafy suburb where the streets are dotted with boutiques and small-batch coffee shops. I feel rather like I’m in the Turkish equivalent of Hampstead. Like London, Istanbul shares a similar sense of being a collection of villages, stitched together over the centuries, and getting away from the centre offers the chance to experience it more like a local than a visitor. We dip into Midnight, where the artfully arranged shelves and racks are filled with jewellery, ceramics and clothes by the city’s hottest designers, and head on to the Petra Roasting Company, where sofas are shared with snoozing cats and the nuttily rich Ethiopian coffee fires us up.
From Bebek, we go further north to Tarabya, a waterfront neighbourhood that has attracted tourists since it began life as a health resort in the 18th century. As we drive alongside the Bosphorus, it reminds me of the winding roads that flank Lake Como: restaurants and hotels on one side, the water on the other – and on the opposite side, opulent mansions built decades, even centuries before, for the city’s wealthy elite.
We’ve come for lunch at Kiyi, an Istanbul institution that has been serving the same fish-rich menu since it opened in the 1960s. The meal is exquisite: plump mussels stuffed with mint, crisp calamari, rose-tinted octopus and taramasalata thick with roe. The vast turbot that appears as our shared main course, buttery soft, slipping off the bone like silk, ruins me for all other fish for ever.
After lunch, we drive back to Beyoglu to explore the cobbled streets of the Çukurcuma district, where the elegant, European-style mansions house antique shops selling everything from ancient statuary to art deco lamps and retro 1960s furniture that could have come straight from the set of Austin Powers. One of the most famous is A La Turca, owned by the ebullient Erkal Aksoy, who shows us around his extraordinary emporium before settling us in on slouchy leather sofas with tea, biscuits and glasses of his homemade cherry brandy.
The following day we set out on the ferry to Kadiköy, on the Asian side – one of the city’s foodiest neighbourhoods. Next to me, a man produces a bread roll from his pocket and tears off chunks, throwing them up to the gaggle of gulls flying alongside the boat. To my surprise, instead of swooping down to gobble the crumbs from the water, they dive and dart to catch the bread in mid-air – an impressive display of aeronautics that shows the gulls are as obsessed with food as everyone else in this city.
In Kadiköy, we dip into pickle shops, with their glass jars stacked from floor to ceiling, and cubby-hole stalls with great gold samovars of olive oil and soft mounds of spices – scarlet chilli, golden saffron, the brittle woody flowers of star anise. It’s warm enough to sit outside for lunch at Çiya Sofras, which specialises in traditional Anatolian dishes. The table groans with unctuous aubergine and yoghurt dips, crispy lahmacun (flatbread with spicy meat) and succulent kebabs.
The ferry ride back is a blissful hit of sunshine before we walk through the city’s Dickensian meatpacking district to one of its newest treasures – the Zeyrek Çinili Hamam – a spectacularly beautiful Turkish bath, dating back to the 16th century. Opening its doors this spring after a 13-year restoration project, it offers bathing spaces that are pristine white and freckled with stars cut into the domed ceiling, and there’s a fascinating museum charting the cultural importance and history of hamams in both Ottoman and modern-day Turkish life.
On our final night, we take a taxi through the city’s labyrinthine roads to Arkestra, Debensason’s restaurant, tucked away in the quiet Etiler neighbourhood in Beşiktaş. Stepping through the door feels like walking into the coolest kind of house party. Upstairs, cocktails are flowing in the Listening Room bar, while the main dining room feels like a buzzy, upmarket bistro. The food is modern and creative, a confident mix of classical French technique and vibrant Asian flavours. Tuna sashimi comes with sushi rice ice-cream and a ginger ponzu vinaigrette, panko fried beef with sweetly sour tonkatsu sauce. Everything looks beautiful, tastes delicious and leaves you wanting just a little bit more – the perfect metaphor for Istanbul itself.
Soho House Istanbul has double rooms from £256 room-only (sohohouse.com)
Istanbul is my second home, and I can attest to its incredible foodways. I'm so glad to see it getting the global recognition it deserves. (Even if I'd have thrown in half a dozen different places!)
Enlarge/ More players have been emerging from this vault lately than have in years. (credit: Samuel Axon)
War never changes, but Fallout 76 sure has. The online game that launched to a negative reception with no NPCs but plenty of bugs has mutated in new directions since its 2018 debut. Now it’s finding new life thanks to the wildly popular Fallout TV series that debuted a couple of weeks ago.
In truth, it never died, though it has stayed in decidedly niche territory for the past six years. Developer Bethesda Game Studios has released regular updates fixing (many of) the bugs, adding new ways to play, softening the game’s rough edges, and yes, introducing Fallout 3- or Fallout 4-like, character-driven quest lines with fully voiced NPCs—something many players felt was missing in the early days.
It’s still not for everybody, but for a select few of us who’ve stuck with it, there’s nothing else quite like it.
Like many older online games, it eventually settled into a situation where most of the players were high-level veterans on the PC and PlayStation platforms. (Microsoft’s Game Pass kept a steady trickle of new players coming in on the Xbox.) That’s all changed now, though; thanks to the TV series, the low-level newbies now outnumber the vets. There’s a wide range of players on every server, and the community’s reputation for being unusually welcoming has held strong amid the influx.
If you’re looking to give it a shot, here’s what you need to know.
A weirdly welcoming wasteland
I generally find the communities in most online games off-putting and toxic. I enjoy the gameplay in Overwatch, for example, but a whole buffet of bad actors makes it a poor experience for me a lot of the time.
That’s not the case with Fallout 76. It’s a phenomenon I also observed with No Man’s Sky’s online community: Games that had disastrous launches that drove away the enthusiastic core gamer crowd early on end up having the best communities.
With Fallout 76, the first few weeks were a storm of negativity like no other. But once the folks who were unimpressed calmed down and moved on, the smaller cadre of people who actually liked the game formed a strong bond. The community was small enough that bad behavior could have social consequences, and it turned out that the kinds of people who stick with a game like Fallout 76 tend to be patient and gracious. Who knew?
For example, there has long been a tradition of experienced players dropping valuable healing items and ammunition by the game’s starting area for newbies to grab. Fallout 76 has strong survival elements, especially at the start, so those gifts make a big difference. This gifting became so common that Bethesda formalized it with a donation box in that starter area. In fact, there are donation boxes scattered all around the game’s map now, and they almost always have stuff in them.
Players will generally be happy to jump on voice chat and talk through the game’s concepts with you or help you defeat difficult enemies. That extends to some communities that talk about the game outside the game, too. (Be sure to look up the subreddit r/fo76FilthyCasuals and its associated Discord; they’re great places to make friends and get advice.)
Time will tell how all that holds as a huge influx of new players shifts the makeup of the community, but so far so good.
How to tell if this unusual game is for you
I’m not saying this game is for everyone, though. Other than lore, it offers very little for fans of the first two pre-Bethesda Fallout games to latch on to. It’s closer to Fallout New Vegas than it is to those, but that’s still not its primary influence. It’s firmly in the Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 tradition.
Picture the questing and exploration of Fallout 3 or Fallout 4 combined with some of the crafting, building, and survival mechanics of a Valheim-type game—including that game’s difficulty progression and range of challenges—with a heavy dose of pre-EverQuest MUDs and MMOs, and an even heavier dose of progressive looter-shooters like Destiny and The Division. Like I said, it’s an odd one.
Frankly, those are a lot of love-em-or-hate-em genres all mashed up into one game. If you love Bethesda Fallout games and looter shooters but don’t like survival and crafting, tough luck. Same goes if you like old-school MMOs and looter shooters but don’t like Bethesda games. The appeal of this game is narrow because of its specific cocktail of divisive genres.
For me, the appeal came from my love of Bethesda’s games—yes, I love Skyrim, but I genuinely like Fallout 4 and Starfield, too—and my appreciation of the Wild West era of online RPGs that came before EverQuest and World of Warcraft solidified the conventions of the massively multiplayer RPG genre.
Fallout 76 is a collaboration between the same DC-area studio that makes Skyrim and Fallout 4, and a newer, Austin, Teaxs-based studio made up of veterans who worked on '90s pioneers like Ultima Online. Both parts of that DNA are here, and I loved that era. I’ll never forget Meridian 59 and Ultima Online or the text MUDs that preceded them. I’ve always resented EverQuest and World of Warcraft for ending that era.
There are now hundreds of NPCs all over Fallout 76's Appalachian wasteland. [credit:
Samuel Axon ]
The rough-around-the-edges-but-refreshing spirit of that time lives on in Fallout 76, and that’s why I love it. Even if you're open-minded to all but one of the genres I mentioned above, you should still give it a try. It might surprise you.
Just be warned that if you're the type to write off games with any form of in-game purchases, you won't love it. Most of the purchases are cosmetic, but there are some real-money things that add gameplay convenience (albeit not so much actual power in any substantial way, for the most part). There's also an optional subscription that's your only way to get some nice quality-of-life features. The game is totally playable and fun without spending a dime, but if that bothers you in principle, well, alas.
If you tried it before the Wastelanders update and its lack of human NPCs was one of the main reasons you didn’t enjoy it, definitely come back. There are plenty of fully voiced quests with interesting, non-robot characters now.
(I’ll confess that I actually liked the game before the human NPCs, by the way. Fallout 76 is set only a few years after the bombs fell, and I always liked the vibe of being one of the first humans to emerge back into the wasteland, forming a bond with other survivors as we dusted off the ruined world. But I get it. Most people disagreed. That’s fine!)
Some tips for the post-apocalypse
Since it's such an unusual game, not everything about it is obvious, and while it offers several quests that function as tutorials to get you initiated, there’s so much depth here that you can miss some stuff. So here’s an assortment of helpful tips from members of the Ars staff who have been playing the game these past few years.
Join a casual party as soon as you log in
Formal groups of players allow you to accumulate a whole range of bonuses, and established players can share powerful perk cards with party members. As such, it’s always worth it to navigate to the social tab in the map view and join a casual party.
Even if you don’t want to socialize, you should be able to find a silent one composed of solo players doing their own thing and still reap the benefits.
Don’t waste stimpaks early on
As in other Fallout games, you’ll come across stimpaks, which are basically healing potions. But because resources are so scarce early on, I don’t recommend using them as is. You can dilute them at a chem station into less powerful versions that you have more of early on or save them for later and use food and other items to recover health.
You’ll eventually reach a point where you have more than you need, but be smart about your resources at the start.
Check the donation boxes at train stations
Fallout 76’s rendition of West Virginia has a network of train stations, and each has some key services: a robot vendor who will buy your stuff, an ammo station, access to your stash box, a place to scrap legendary items, a few crafting tables, a stand for changing your perk card loadout, and those donation boxes I mentioned earlier. Seriously, there’s usually something in the donation boxes. What’s junk to high-level players might be life-saving for newbies, so always check those boxes when you see them.
Do the main quest, get better backpacks
In the main quest, you get a plan for crafting a backpack to increase your carrying capacity. If you’ve played any Bethesda or survival game before, you know this is a big deal. It’s worth focusing on the main storyline until you get this plan, at least. You can get even better backpacks through a time-consuming series of quests at the Pioneer Scouts camp near Grafton Dam.
You’ll need a lot of wood—you’ll find it in Helvetia
Wood is needed for building structures of various types, yes, but more importantly, you need it for crafting almost all food. (Firewood, get it?) Fortunately, there's an abundant source in a town called Helvetia in the middle-north part of the map.
This is the location of Helvetia, which randomly seems to have the best source of wood in the game. [credit:
Samuel Axon ]
Find the house pictured here and activate the piles of lumber seen there. Even one trip is more than enough wood than a newbie needs, but you can quit and rejoin to find a new server where it hasn't been looted yet to stock up even more if needed.
There’s food that boosts your XP, and it’s easy to get
You can accelerate leveling up significantly by regularly consuming food that gives you a boost to XP gained for a period of time. It’s not immediately obvious where or how to find this food, but once you know where to look, it’s not hard to collect.
There are two ways that are easy for new players. First is the Feed the People public event at Mama Dolce’s Food Processing on the north side of the map. This event rewards XP-boosting food.
This is the food processing plant with the XP food event. [credit:
Samuel Axon ]
The second is making any food with cranberries. You can find cranberries all over the place, but the safest place for new players is Aaronholt Farmstead in the far northwest corner of the map. There’s a field beneath the farm on the hill that just has a few easy insect enemies and a whole bunch of cranberries to pick. Cook them up and enjoy the XP benefits.
The Uranium Fever public event is your ticket to power and riches
Occasionally, public events will be announced across the world that players can team up to take on. Most of these are worth doing, especially for a new player. But one is a fast-lane trip to a better future: Uranium Fever.
The event tasks players with defending a handful of generators against attacking molemen. The molemen drop lots of valuable weapons, and every few minutes a legendary enemy will appear and drop a legendary item for anyone who hits him before he dies. Fortunately, Fallout 76 players are total buddies, and they’ll usually try to wait before delivering the killing blow until it seems like everyone’s tagged him for the loot.
Keep the legendaries if they fit your build or scrap them for legendary scrips that can be traded for random legendaries that might be a better fit. For the non-legendary weapons, trek your way to the nearby train station to sell them all to a robot vendor. If you keep doing this, you’ll make tons of caps.
Travel to the Whitespring Resort
In the first year of Fallout 76, a location called The Whitespring Resort was, for a whole bunch of reasons, the main hub of the game. That's not as true these days, but it is still worth a visit. The main reason: It has more NPC vendors than any other location, selling a wide variety of goods—especially those that are useful earlier in the game.
This is Whitespring Resort, a sort of working mall in Fallout 76. [credit:
Samuel Axon ]
It has some fairly high-level enemies outside, so you'll want to make your way indoors as soon as possible. Once you're in, you can fast-travel there without risk in the future.
Radiation is powerful in ways you might not expect
Radiation might seem like an irritation, as it reduces your maximum health. But it turns out that it offers a kind of devil’s bargain that unlocks true power in the endgame.
I’m talking about mutations. These are character traits you can randomly acquire when you’re subjected to a high amount of radiation.
These are all the mutations my character has. There's a lot going on here. [credit:
Samuel Axon ]
Initially, they come with a crippling downside to offset their powerful advantages. But there are perk cards in the game that allow you to construct builds that mostly negate the downsides, meaning carefully curating a set of powerful mutations for your build will be key for endgame performance.
You can roll the dice for these by irradiating yourself, but you can also buy (usually expensive) serums from other players that give you specific ones. Once you have the perk card to cut the negatives, it’s absolutely worth acquiring some mutations.
Behold the strength of the bloodied build
The other trick with radiation is what the community calls “bloodied” builds. See, there are some legendary weapons that have an attribute called “bloodied” that increases their damage output by up to 75 percent relative to how low your health is. If you irradiate yourself down to just 20 percent of your maximum hit points, you’ll cap out your health there, so stimpaks won’t overheal you to negate the benefits.
You might think that your survivability would take a huge hit, but there are several perk cards that give you the ability to significantly mitigate or even completely avoid damage at low health or high rads. Combine all this together, and bloodied builds are a force to be reckoned with.
Bethesda has released balance patches over the years—including some specifically meant to even the playing field with bloodied builds—but the high-rad lifestyle always seems to stay near the top.
If it’s for you, it’s for you
If you give the game a shot and don’t like it, that’s OK. But there’s never been a better time to try, and if you do like it—awesome! I’ll see you in Appalachia. Have yourself a most joyous Fastnacht, and all hail the beneficent Mothman. (All that will make sense after a while, I promise.)
Enlarge/ Jürgen Trittin, member of the German Bundestag and former environment minister, stands next to an activist during an action of the environmental organization Greenpeace in front of the Brandenburg Gate in April 2023. The action is to celebrate the shutdown of the last three German nuclear power plants. (credit: Christoph Soeder/Picture Alliance via Getty Images)
One year ago, Germany took its last three nuclear power stations offline. When it comes to energy, few events have baffled outsiders more.
In the face of climate change, calls to expedite the transition away from fossil fuels, and an energy crisis precipitated by Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Berlin’s move to quit nuclear before carbon-intensive energy sources like coal has attracted significant criticism. (Greta Thunberg prominently labeled it “a mistake.”)
This decision can only be understood in the context of post-war socio-political developments in Germany, where anti-nuclearism predated the public climate discourse.
From a 1971 West German bestseller evocatively titled Peaceably into Catastrophe: A Documentation of Nuclear Power Plants, to huge protests of hundreds of thousands—including the largest-ever demonstration seen in the West German capital Bonn—the anti-nuclear movement attracted national attention and widespread sympathy. It became a major political force well before even the Chernobyl disaster of 1986.
Its motivations included: a distrust of technocracy; ecological, environmental, and safety fears; suspicions that nuclear energy could engender nuclear proliferation; and general opposition to concentrated power (especially after its extreme consolidation under the Nazi dictatorship).
Instead, activists championed what they regarded as safer, greener, and more accessible renewable alternatives like solar and wind, embracing their promise of greater self-sufficiency, community participation, and citizen empowerment (“energy democracy”).
This support for renewables was less about CO₂ and more aimed at resetting power relations (through decentralised, bottom-up generation rather than top-down production and distribution), protecting local ecosystems, and promoting peace in the context of the Cold War.
Germany’s Energiewende
The contrast here with Thunberg’s latter-day Fridays for Future movement and its “listen to the experts” slogan is striking. The older activist generation deliberately rejected the mainstream expertise of the time, which then regarded centralised nuclear power as the future and mass deployment of distributed renewables as a pipe dream.
This earlier movement was instrumental in creating Germany’s Green Party—today the world’s most influential—which emerged in 1980 and first entered national government from 1998 to 2005 as junior partner to the Social Democrats. This “red-green” coalition banned new reactors, announced a shutdown of existing ones by 2022, and passed a raft of legislation supporting renewable energy.
That, in turn, turbocharged the national deployment of renewables, which ballooned from 6.3 percent of gross domestic electricity consumption in 2000 to 51.8 percent in 2023.
These figures are all the more remarkable given the contributions of ordinary citizens. In 2019, they owned fully 40.4 percent (and over 50 percent in the early 2010s) of Germany’s total installed renewable power generation capacity, whether through community wind energy cooperatives, farm-based biogas installations, or household rooftop solar.
Most other countries’ more recent energy transitions have been attempts to achieve net-zero targets using whatever low-carbon technologies are available. Germany’s now-famous “Energiewende” (translated as “energy transition” or even “energy revolution”), however, has from its earlier inception sought to shift away from both carbon-intensive as well as nuclear energy to predominantly renewable alternatives.
Consecutive German governments have, over the past two and a half decades, more or less hewed to this line. Angela Merkel’s pro-nuclear second cabinet (2009–13) was an initial exception.
That lasted until the 2011 Fukushima disaster, after which mass protests of 250,000 and a shock state election loss to the Greens forced that administration, too, to revert to the 2022 phaseout plan. Small wonder that so many politicians today are reluctant to reopen that particular Pandora’s box.
Another ongoing political headache is where to store the country’s nuclear waste, an issue Germany has never managed to solve. No community has consented to host such a facility, and those designated for this purpose have seen large-scaleprotests.
Instead, radioactive waste has been stored in temporary facilities close to existing reactors—no long-term solution.
Nuclear remains unpopular
National polls underscore the Teutonic aversion to nuclear. Even in 2022, at the height of the recent energy crisis, a survey found that 52 percent opposed constructing new reactors, though 78 percent supported a temporary extension of existing plants until summer 2023. The three-way Social Democratic-Green-Liberal coalition government ultimately compromised on mid-April 2023.
Today, 51.6 percent of Germans believe this was premature. However, a further deferral was deemed politically unfeasible given the trenchant anti-nuclearism of the Greens and sizeable cross sections of the population.
Despite some public protestations to the contrary (the main opposition CDU party declared in January that Germany “cannot do without the nuclear power option at present”), in private, few political leaders think the country will, or even realistically can, reverse course.
As an industry insider told me, talk of reintroducing nuclear to Germany is “delusional” because investors were “burnt … too many times” in the past and now “would rather put their money into safer investments.” Moreover, “it would take decades to build new [nuclear] power stations” and electricity is no longer the sector of concern, given the rapid buildout of renewables, with attention having shifted to heating and transport.
Predictions that the nuclear exit would leave Germany forced to use more coal and facing rising prices and supply problems, meanwhile, have not transpired. In March 2023—the month before the phaseout—the distribution of German electricity generation was 53 percent renewable, 25 percent coal, 17 percent gas, and 5 percent nuclear. In March 2024, it was 60 percent renewable, 24 percent coal, and 16 percent gas.
Overall, the past year has seen record renewable power production nationwide, a 60-year low in coal use, sizeable emissions cuts, and decreasing energy prices.
The country’s energy sector, it seems, has already moved on. In the words of one industry observer: “Once you switch off these nuclear power stations, they’re out.” And there’s no easy way back.
For better or worse, this technology—in its present form at least—is dead in the water here. For many Germans, it will not be missed.
Trevelyan Wing, Fellow of the Cambridge Centre for Geopolitics and Centre Researcher at the Cambridge Centre for Environment, Energy and Natural Resource Governance (CEENRG), University of Cambridge. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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