Republicans aren’t fit to govern.

I’m reminded of that Sartre quote again

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

I like to remind people that the first mad Max movie isn’t like fury road. It’s a mostly normal world that’s just starting to fall apart.

Well, if you want to have a conversation go ahead and read the rest of the post. Otherwise you’re just kind of jerking yourself off

At the very least form unions. That will help with stuff like wage theft, some people getting underpaid, BS firings, etc.

More aggressively, maybe some sort of collective ownership. Not this “options” bullshit where they never even vest for most people. The whole thing where management pays you $100 and sells what you made for $3000 needs to go. That $3000 needs to be more fairly shared among the people that made it happen.

But I don’t really know. I’m just some guy with entry level knowledge and a sense that the current system is wrong.

They could live more modest lives in more rural areas

Living in a rural area for many people is literal hell, on top of having an array of less obvious costs. The big one is going from not needing a car to needing one. Your rent might drop $500 but you need to spend a lot on gas, insurance, maintenance, etc.

Also the social options might fall off a cliff. Humans are social creatures. I live in a city and I can walk to dozens of social activities, many of them free. Board game meetups, free music in the park, free museums with tours, free sport leagues, etc. Out in the countryside there just aren’t as many options.

If you’re queer or another minority, you might also have a worse time in the countryside. Maybe even fatally. A city is going to have a queer scene.

Also, there are likely more jobs in the city. Remote work and economic upheaval have changed things, but even so, most of those offices in Manhattan are full of jobs. There’s just more stuff where there’s more people.

Now, to your point, some people are certainly living in a $5900/mo apartment with a doorman and in-building gym that they can’t afford. They could move to a less “nice” place in south Brooklyn or Queens for less than half that, likely at the cost of a longer commute, and losing easy access to a neighborhood they feel a part of. There is a housing crisis though, and people are getting priced further away. That’s probably not going to be solved any time soon because capitalism doesn’t care and will happily eat itself.

Anyway. Long tangent but I’m extremely pro city so I spoke up.

I feel like letting your skills in reading and communicating in writing atrophy is a poor choice. And skills do atrophy without use. I used to be able to read a book and write an essay critically analyzing it. If I tried to do that now, it would be a rough start.

I don’t think people are going to just up and forget how to write, but I do think they’ll get even worse at it if they don’t do it.

But if the text you’re working on is small, you could just do it yourself. You don’t need an expensive guessing machine.

Like, if I built a rube-goldberg machine using twenty rubber ducks, a diesel engine, and a blender to tie my shoes, and it gets it right most of the time, that’s impressive. but also kind of a stupid waste, because I could’ve just tied them with my hands.

Are you including stock stuff in this calculation?

I had a recruiter reach out to me for a job that was focused on facilitating people using stock as collateral to get personal loans. I think that’s one of the mechanisms rich people use to leverage their non-cash wealth without paying taxes. I told him that sounded like it should be illegal, and that was the end of that.

I don’t think AI is actually that good at summarizing. It doesn’t understand the text and is prone to hallucinate. I wouldn’t trust an AI summary for anything important.

Also search just seems like overkill. If I type in “population of london”, i just want to be taken to a reputable site like wikipedia. I don’t want a guessing machine to tell me.

Other use cases maybe. But there are so many poor uses of AI, it’s hard to take any of it seriously.

Assuming what you’re describing works (and i have no particular reason to doubt, beyond the generally poor reputation of AI), that’s a different beast than “lol i fired all the copywriters, artists, and support staff so I, the owner, could keep more profits for myself!”. Or, “I didn’t pay attention in English 101 and don’t know how to write, so I’ll have expensive auto suggest do it for me”

I used a lot of mods, but I don’t remember all of them right now

“Natural growth and decay” I think was the one I got for stats, because I didn’t want to deal with the original’s insane leveling system. It was pretty good, but had some bugs. Once you got money to pay for training, the wheels fell off because you could rocket up all your skills and stats.

Once you have the skills for Frenzy100 and a spear, you can get unlimited money by taking out the guards that carry ebony weapons. Ok, that kind of wackiness is a little charming.

I also got a mod so NPCs had more money, because hitting every merchant in town and advancing time so they refresh is really tedious.

Oh, and I got one so Magicka regenerates, because constantly sleeping or chugging potions is tedious.

And one so you can have up to 12 marks saved.

If you have any recs let me know

I keep hoping this will spark some sort of anti-capitalist zeitgeist. But labor might be too scattered and individualistic.

Like, why are we all scrambling for a handful of jobs when the rich have so many resources?

games? I found a civilization port for the phone and it sucked up a lot of time. Turn based so you can do it for a few minutes at a time: https://yairm210.itch.io/unciv

learn a language? duolingo and other apps are out there

People should probably protest this. go in person and demand to speak to your rep. or whatever. i don’t know how to organize a protest. i just go when i hear about them happening.

https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Ald'ruhn#Notes

It’s the Ald’ruhn fighter’s guild. Apparently it’s not a full set, but it’s a lot of it.

I think “what’s good for me right now” is fundamental to the right wing viewset. Hypocrisy isn’t a factor because that doesn’t typically intersect with “is this good for me right now?”

You can point out they said X and now they say Not-X, but that’s going to be as effective as someone telling you that your math is wrong because yesterday you were wearing green and today you’re wearing brown. it’s just a non-sequitur to them.

Reminds me of my first big success at work. There was a weekly report that people wanted generated - it showed how much like each operator had done, how much each warehouse had shipped, how many orders we lost from stock issues, etc. it was a low tech company, so they had someone going through the limited UI, looking up each thing one at a time, copying it into excel, and making the report that way. It took hours, and was error prone from stuff like mis-pasting or accidentally skipping a user.

Took a look at it and was like you could definitely automate this. Used some very primitive scripting to pull all the info out of the system’s UI and dump it into a TSV. Took like a couple minutes to run it, import into excel, and add the colors. But it was super janky because it was manipulating the UI like a user instead of, like, directly querying whatever underlying data store it was running on.

Still, management was impressed. I later learned no one actually looked at the report most weeks, so that took some of the wind out of my sails.

This is an ancient joke but they replaced the original pigeon with a blue thing instead. :confused:

You know, I replayed it recently (with OpenMW) and for 2002 yes, but by more modern standards not really, not for me. The leveling system is really bad. The combat system is an awful mix of dice rolls and action, where neither is satisfying. Movement is glacial and it takes a long time to either level speed or get mark/recall. NPC interaction is minimal.

It certainly has a lot of cool stuff in it. Spellcrafting is cool (if janky). Enchanting was like spellcrafting, but better. Alchemy can get bonkers. The world is huge, and because it was less level-scaling and procedural-generation you sometimes could find really interesting things. Like breaking into a room in the fighter’s guild and finding a full set of glass armor. Super cool. Of course, the illusion of a believable world immediately shatters when you walk right out wearing the stolen armor and no one reacts.

So, yes and no. Amazing, for 2002. But also kind of limited, and sometimes kind of bad, and they haven’t really reached new heights in the past 23+ years. All of their games handle stealth badly. They all handle damage badly. There’s just not two decades of improvement by them.