I leave my PR in draft until the checks pass. I don’t want anyone reviewing it when it’s broken.

The other day I saw some dude throw his cigarette on the ground before getting on line in front me to get carded to enter a bar. For a long moment I considered picking it up and going “hey, you dropped this” and handing it back to him.

But I didn’t, because there’s no way that ends happily.

But man, fuck people who litter.

I have a recurring fantasy of a honey pot for this sort of thing. You advertise like an exclusive doodad that no reasonable person would buy. Maybe extra-large cars. Maybe horse armor. Could be anything. Everyone who goes to buy one goes straight to therapy, and they don’t leave until they’re no longer a fucking moron. Kind of like The Good Place.

Unfortunately, no. I think it was a semi-obscure but not terribly so word like “esoteric”. We were all native speakers from the same region. From what else I remember from the conversation, her general practice was to avoid looking things up. If she couldn’t figure it out from context, it wasn’t worth doing more.

Unfortunately most people use very flawed arguments like trying to appeal to emotions or strawmaning my point (or one of the many fallacious things we all have to deal online). And that will not convince me, in fact it only proves you have absolutely no argument

One thing I struggle to remember sometimes is someone can make a bad argument, but what they’re arguing for can still be true.

I used to work with a guy that would argue with me, and sometimes at the end he’d be like “I actually agree with your point, but I wanted you to be right for solid reasons”

Of course, it’s also very common for people to be making bad arguments because they’re just feeling stuff, and they’re pulling together whatever words come close to capturing that right now.

This reminded me of a person I used to know. She adamantly refused to look things up. We were having some casual conversation about work, and I was like “I think that’s not what that word means.” She just refused to look at the dictionary or engage with trying to find out the answer. I don’t know if it was pride, or an insane commitment to a bit, but it was frustrating to deal with.

Incidentally, she was the worst D&D player I ever had, and was deeply dysfunctional in her romantic relationships. I can only imagine what madness she’s up to now.

I think it was Diablo 3 (not a game I recommend) that had like “5% more damage” and “5% more fire damage” as buffs, but due to esoteric maths, the latter was significantly more impactful on the damage equation. Not a fan of that kind of secret maths in games.

I remember once when I was a kid, my uncle asked me something or other. I dithered for a bit, and then admitted I didn’t actually know. He said something really nice about how it’s much better to just say you don’t know than to dig deeper into bullshit. Really stuck with me, for some reason.

I was talking about this with someone a while ago and they suggested that some people’s lived experiences have been more… abusive. Like as a child if they made a mistake their parents treated them like shit. Now they have that untreated trauma deep in their personality. When they make a mistake like making a reservation at the wrong time, they subconsciously think it’s going to be like when their dad screamed at them, smacked them, and sent them to bed without dinner. So they lie and prevaricate to avoid that.

I don’t know how often that kind of early childhood trauma is the root of the behavior, but if that is happening that’s really sad.

Also it’s one of the things destroying politics.

That’s often the previous stop on this train of thought. There are maga people that in their secret heart know they’ve made a mistake, but they struggle to come to terms with that. Though that also carries the fear of losing all their social bonds and being rejected by the group.

I sometimes think about how things are so bad in part because there are so many people making unnecessary bad decisions. Like, just don’t buy the horse armor. Do something else.

But there are so many idiots that bad things remain profitable

I’ve met two of my neighbors, but don’t know them well. One might even have moved away- haven’t seen her in months.

I have two friends that live nearby. Three if you stretch what’s considered the neighborhood. All walking distance.

I don’t think the graphics are a big part of the problem. It’s more the math.

Pillars of Eternity, for example, has it so every point of Might above 10 is 3% more damage. This is a little hard to reason about - my sword says it does 17-24 damage. So if I have 15 might, that’s 15% more damage , so the sword is now… 19-27? I had to use a calculator because I’m kind of bad at math. If I take one more point of might, my max damage becomes…28? Does it round?

This is not very quick and easy.

Now imagine instead of every point of might was just +2 damage. Or +5 damage. Much easier to reason about. If you want might to matter more for some weapons, slap a double might bonus on them. You might (pun intended) just need to scale the rest of the system around this new range of values.

I accidentally swerved a little from “impactful stats only” to “easily understood stats”, but they’re kind of related.

It’s the usual “there must be in groups for the law to protect but not bind, and out groups for the law to bind but not protect” thing as always.

They wanted small government when it suited their desires. Their desires, as conservatives, are usually bad. Pollution, exploration, segregation, etc.

I think if I was making a game I would really strive to make it so every upgrade is meaningful and easily noticed.

I liked pillars of eternity, but I didn’t like trying to think about if 3% more damage was even going to survive rounding.

There’s a few strands of toxic monogamy that are pretty common. Really jealous, controlling, and with poor emotional regulation.

I’m lucky my current partner is very chill about these things. I’m still good friends with two previous partners and it’s never been an issue. We’ve all hung out together.

I was looking at the costs of raising a child the other day and I don’t know how anyone does it. My job pays garbage with trash health insurance.

I’m just so mad at the management class with their high pay and not doing any actual work. My boss seems fine - I think he knows this is bullshit and goes a little out of his way to make it easier for me. But everyone above him? If I saw them drowning I’d have to think a long time before throwing a life vest.

For any question about “why is this extra bad in the United States?”, racism is probably a big factor. There’s a book “Dying of Whiteness” that’s pretty horrifying. Some people would literally rather suffer and die personally than let black people have nice things.

It’s not the only factor, but it’s a big one.

I often have to toggle airplane mode when I take the subway. After it loses signal, it won’t reconnect until I do. Older android phone.

How about labor getting their fair share of loss if business they work in fails. No? Why not?

If the business fails, the workers lose their income and their shares are just as worthless as anyone else. The workers should have shares. (Or some other mechanism so there’s not a handful of fat cats living a life of luxury due to the labor of many others)

The person who started the business can always go work somewhere else. It’s not like he’s put to death. And if the concern is that “someone who loses their money might suffer and die” then we should fix that problem more generally, because there are many other ways to end up there.

And you haven’t proposed any better system. It’s always the same when I ask that question.

That wasn’t the question or the point. A fairer system off the top of my head is profit sharing with a union. But that wasn’t the point.

If someone says “X is bad for A, B, C” saying that Z isn’t better is not a rebuttal. We haven’t gotten that far. We’re trying to reach agreement that X is bad. Then we can talk about replacing or fixing it. Maybe Z does suck.

It’s a common mistake. Someone will be like “windows sucks” and someone will be like “well apple is expensive”, just blazing by on that express train of thought. Take the local train.

But I’m still in favor of capitalism. Because my parents and grandparents lived in socialism and told me how their life looked like.

So you have generational trauma skewing your views.

Long story short: It was an inescapable poverty and no free speech.

Free speech has absolutely nothing to do with this economic system. And let me remind you of all the people fired because their employer didn’t like what they said, where they risk falling into poverty and worse.

The way capitalism manifests in the US is a set of tiny tyrannies. Your boss tells you when you can piss, what you can wear, what you can say in public. Maybe you don’t care because you are the boss. You give your people time off?

I am a capitalist. I run super small business. If you think it’s sunshine and rainbow, you’re sorely mistaken. It’s more work, there’s no pay guarantee, competition is ALWAYS ahead of you, in capital, scale and know-how, you’re sweating shitless on any change in costs, because raising prices always comes at the risk of losing customers, meanwhile you’re required to do shit ton of government mandated paperwork.

And the dream is for you to make it so big that you don’t have to work anymore. Your business expands. You buy out or out compete everyone else. You sit back and let other people work. Then you raise prices, lower wages, and buy a private jet.

The end state of capitalism is a rich asshole who doesn’t work, and a shitty world for everyone else. Maybe it takes years. But enshittification is pretty widely understood.

Maybe a worker owned collective would enshittify, too. But as a small consolation, you’d at least have thousands of rich people instead of a billionaire.

Now, I wrote this on the toilet so it’s not the most coherent or polished. I appreciate you taking the time to go back and forth even though we disagree.