Some kinds of people (often conservatives) don’t use words to convey consistent meaning. They use words for the effect it has on the audience. It’s emotions.
They see something bad, they reach into their bag of bad-thing-words, and pull out “Marxist”. That’s it.
They are in a fundamental sense stupid.
Most self described Christians don’t really follow their religion very well.
Ownership will abuse labor as much as it can. Sometimes to make more profit. Sometimes for murkier reasons. I think some management are just stupid and they’d hurt the company to follow their unfounded feelings.
Labor should organize.
Yeah it bothers me when the community for a game is like “{skill} is TRASH never use it” and when you do some digging you find it’s like 2% less damage per second. Or it doesn’t work well in NG+7. Some people are really obsessive about this stuff.
I’ve been happy with Bandcamp. They got sold recently so their future is uncertain, but I downloaded all the music I bought.
They don’t really have an algorithm, but you can see who else purchased something, and they do blog posts about like “what’s new in [genre]” that’s worth reading. So far as I can tell it’s written by real people.
NYC had good turnout despite the rain.
DND is tricky to recommend. On the one hand, as far as RPGs go it’s mega popular. On the other, it’s a very specific kind of game and rather finicky.
Many people who don’t want to play fantasy dungeon crawling tactical combat would enjoy other genres, but finding those groups can be harder. One of my friends has no real interest in fantasy, but immediately was like “LET’S DO IT” when I mentioned a game of Vampire.
The tabletop game meetup I know of (in New York) is explicitly friendly to new players. One of the hosts said their first game ever was at the meetup many years ago.
One of the reasons I prefer playing on PC over other platforms is there’s usually fan made mods / cheats. Like, yeah, I could do something really tedious for four hours, or I could get a mod to skip it. This is my leisure activity, not an exam.
I try to be mindful that too much cheating can water down the experience. Like, if I was playing BG3 and just set everyone to max level from the start, I would probably have less fun, personally. But if someone just wants to do the story and have fun with exploding barrels? Not for me to judge.
(I do draw the line at multiplayer. Cheating against other people is rude as heck. )
Yeah. Often when I talk to people who say they “don’t have time” I wonder where their time is going. Often to watching TV. Sometimes podcasts. Social media is a big time suck.
But like if you have time to watch all of the office again this year, you had time to play video games.
A friend of mine realized they were just losing hours a day to Instagram. Delete that, and you have time for better hobbies. Play a game. Read a book.
Having children seems like a bigger factor. The only couple I know that has kids still has time. One spends it on DND, and other on TV and simple phone games.
Right, humans are bad about that kind of thing. I think it has to do with Dunbar’s number? The monkeysphere? It’s hard for us to model a lot of people as full people in our head, especially as they’re more removed from us.
Like you probably don’t really think about the garbage man as a fully fleshed out guy with hopes, dreams, a favorite band, a love that got away, and all that. When you have some absolutely rancid trash, you probably just throw it in the can and forget about it. But if it was your mother or best friend that was going to have to deal with it, maybe you’d be more careful. Wouldn’t want the bag to rip and spray maggots all over Mom.
That’s fine. That’s all of us.
But I think there’s degrees. Shades. Like you mentioned cell phones. Most of us accept the out of sight horrors that go with them. But, like, some people are absolute assholes to wait staff. Just treat the waiter like shit, are rude to the coffee shop people, whatever. I think most of us recognize that as bad.
Somewhere between those two points I think is “I’m going to build software to spy on people”. Personally, I think that should be ok the far side of the line. The not okay side. Why? A bit of self preservation, a bit of ethics, and a helping of “I don’t want to contribute to bad things happening to people, even ones I don’t know”.
This post is getting long. I think you’re right that it’s not as simple as “doesn’t care about other people” but I think that’s a factor.
Did anything even happen to the cop that shot that journalist? Seems like everyone just accepted this instead of bringing charges or vigilanteism
I think this is one of those pearl clutching communities. Borderline collaboration, but it’s their power to enforce their rules.
Oh I read something interesting about that once. I think it came at it as big city vs urban modes of thought.
Someone who lives in a big city surrounded by many people realizes quickly you need robust systems. You just don’t have the time to handle every case as a unique circumstance. So you have laws and regulations to shift things earlier in the process when they’re easier to deal with (eg: fire codes before the building gets built, instead of no codes and a fire hazard)
The other mode doesn’t think like that. They can have simple laws on the books, and if there’s a problem they’ll just go talk it out with Brian the sheriff. Sure abortion is bad but you know little Suzie she just made a mistake, you can make an exception for her, right?
Obviously the “treat every case as special and rely on informal social connections” doesn’t scale or consistently deliver fair, just, outcomes. But according to some half remembered post I read, that’s how some right wing people view the world. You can have draconian laws, but the people enforcing them know when to apply them (against those assholes) and when not (for good folks who made a mistake)
So, I guess, corruption.
Single use plastic should he illegal for most things. Yes, it might be inconvenient to have to carry your own thermos or whatever, but filling the ocean with plastic is worse than inconvenient
He was a pretty smart guy, so I’m pretty sure he understood the ramifications. This isn’t like a plumber working in a building that happens to house an evil company. This was directly working as a high ranking software developer at a shitty software company.
I’ve thought about that. But that seems like a terrible strategy, because it lets the Republicans do anything. The Republicans do a bad thing, or accuse you of doing a bad thing, and now you’re incapable of responding to it?
Palantir is pretty awful. I knew a guy who took a job there, a bunch of years ago. When he said where he was going, I asked “But what if they work on something really shitty? Like spying on people?”. He was like, “Meh”, with a big shrug.
He was friendly and kind to the people around him, but I guess he just didn’t care about anyone he didn’t know personally right now.
I’ve already posted this a few times, but Ed Zitron wrote a long article about what he calls “Business Idiots”. Basically, people in decision making positions who are out of touch with their users and their products. They make bad decisions, and that’s a big factor in why everything kind of sucks now.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the-business-idiot/ (it’s long)
I think a lot of us have this illusion that higher ranking people are smarter, more visionary, or whatever. But I think no. I think a lot of people are just kind of stupid, surrounded by other stupid people, cushioned from real, personal, consequences. On top of that, for many enterprises, the incentives don’t line up with the users. At least wikipedia isn’t profit driven, but you can probably think of some things you’ve used that got more annoying with updates. Like google putting more ads up top, or any website that does a redesign that yields more ad space, worse navigation.
A friend and I were talking about what’s wrong with the world, and one of the things we discussed was there aren’t any consequences for minor infractions. We’re all too polite. Someone does something shitty, like this person in their car, or someone taking up 4 seats on the bus, or throwing their trash on the street, and no one does anything. No one wants to start a fight or make a scene.
Many people operate at a very basic level of moral reasoning: avoid punishment. Some people, some of the time, achieve higher levels of reasoning like “I should follow the rules” or even “I should do what’s good for society.” But many people chill out at the toddler level of “I don’t want to be punished.” So it follows that when these oversized toddlers never get punished, they think they’re doing just fine.
But concurrently, the institution we have to enforce laws and norms, the police, sucks dog shit. Racist, corrupt, no accountability, and lazy. If I see a guy littering, I’m not going to call the cops. They wouldn’t even come, for one thing, but I also don’t want to bring a bunch of armed assholes into the scene.
I don’t know what the best way forward is. My friend suggested local “guardian angel” volunteers that patrol and “Deal with” people who are shitty, but that feels like it could just turn into the police-but-worse. But I really want people who shit up the world to stop, and it feels like they don’t have enough empathy to understand anything more complex than “you took up four seats on the bus and were blasting youtube out of your phone, so we threw you out. Enjoy walking home, asshole.”