no different than taking a bunch of books you bought second-hand and throwing them into a blender.

They didn’t buy the books. They took them without permission.

They will accept any negative sum game, they will ruin their own livelihoods and their own lives, if only it helps sad little kings of sad little hills.

I’m reminded of that book about Authoritarian Personality Types. They did like a model UN / Civilization game kind of thing, where the players represented different countries and could make decisions about policy, war, and so on. There were two groups. Unknown to the players, the people running this experiment put all the people who scored high for authoritarian personality in one group, and everyone else in the other group.

The group with low authoritarian personality scores? Basically everything was fine. They solved the ozone layer crisis. They were solving world hunger. One guy tried to be a dick and the rest of the group brought him in line.

The high authoritarian guys? Nuclear apocalypse. They made them sit in the dark for five minutes to think about what they’d done, and let them have a do-over. They still did a shit job. Petty squabbling. Stealing. Out of control climate crisis.

I don’t think there’s an ethical way to do this in real life, but I do think if you just didn’t allow people with that kind of personality to have any real power, we’d all be much better off.

It’s also possible i mangled the story because I rewrote it here from memory, but I believe it was in this book: https://theauthoritarians.org/

Ed Zitron wrote a blog post I’ve been thinking about, where he said that a lot of decisions are made by “business idiots” now. People that don’t really use or understand the product, and don’t really understand the users or their needs. It’s an interesting read, even though the guy is rather verbose: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the-business-idiot/

I see what you did there and I’m not going to fully fall for it.

I saw that one too and thought similarly!

Opportunity costs still exist

Also never heard of it, but if it was exclusive to china that explains why.

Any word on the gameplay? Main line borderlands games are kind of mediocre, so I don’t imagine an MMO would be better.

Spotify kind of sucks. I’ve been buying music from the musicians (mostly via Bandcamp) for years. Buying one album a month for like $8 means is cheaper than a subscription, and I now have a huge library of music.

I had an issue with installing mint. Never figured it out. Got the older LTS and it worked fine though. Maybe try a different version?

Parents often take time off from work to grieve. Classes are often disrupted when a student dies abruptly. This isn’t Skyrim where someone dies and forty seconds later it’s “Must be hearing things”. Plus, as I said, letting the kid die means the resources spend raising and educating them are wasted.

My point is that “oh if he dies it only affects the family” is stupid.

If I’m on my land I’m gonna do whatever I want. I’ll get drunk and do donuts on my lawn. Maybe I’ll set off 10 pounds of tannerite in my backyard because that’s what people do in the middle of nowhere.

[mean words] Edit: I take that back. I’m hangry. I don’t like rugged individualism but that was uncalled for

Should my mom not have allowed me to practice my drums in the barn because the audio was escaping the property and the neighbors could hear faint drumming in the middle of the day sometimes?

Non sequitur.

If it’s on private property who gives a shit. If your idiot son wants to build a structurally questionable tree house and the parents don’t do anything about it and he dies that’s on them.

it’s on all of us, because all the money and effort that went into educating and raising that kid is wasted. Plus the rippling effects outward from everyone who knew the kid grieving.

Also the more exceptions you have to rules, the more confusing it is and the more likely people are going to fuck it up.

“Always wear a hardhat on site” - easy. simple. minimal room for interpretation.

“Always wear a hardhat on site when any of the following conditions are true: [a, b, c, d] unless [e, f]” is going to lead to errors, and then people will get hurt.

People aren’t that smart. Especially when they’re not motivated, or distracted.

If we were all in the room, we could strangle Sam Altman or whatever other capitalist dog was calling the shots.

every American worker pays into the social security system as a tax on income.

One irritating note on this: there’s a limit to how much social security tax you pay per year. So if you’re making a lot of income, you just stop paying this tax partway through the year.

This is pants on head stupid and regressive. It should be the other way around. Your first, let’s say $10,000 should be exempt from the tax, and it should get steeper as income goes up.

Rich guy absolutely does not need the bump in take home pay from hitting the cap. Poor guy definitely could use the extra income early income not being taxed.

I’m just so mad all the time about people licking the boots of the rich. They don’t need breaks! They’re rich! They’re going to be fine!

If those Internet duds that get mad about black people in video games spent like half that energy being mad about, like, wage theft, we’d be so much better off.

Maybe was thinking of https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/ai-haters-build-tarpits-to-trap-and-trick-ai-scrapers-that-ignore-robots-txt/ ?

I had a thought earlier in the bathroom about AI. It’s like building a fancy indoor toilet when you don’t have plumbing.

If people’s basic needs were met, housing food health care all that, then it wouldn’t really matter as much if people want to fuck around with AI. People who do things for passion could still do so.

But we live in a capitalist hell, this AI stuff will primarily benefit the ownership class while everyone else suffers.

I don’t need a fancy toilet. I need clean running water.

Are they remaking it with the same bizarre D&D 3.x rules system? I think I’d pass. Those rules were bad.

Good. Escalate further. I want to see musk sobbing in fear before the lights go out of his eyes.

The whole “most startups lose a lot of money and fail, but some will be wildly successful” model is kind of rotten. Especially when the "wild success " often means breaking laws or becoming consumer hostile.