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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • Government is inefficient if you elect people who believe it is and set out to prove it.

    People who say “run things like a business” don’t know shit. Every job I’ve worked at has had tremendous waste, but no one was looking closely because it’s private.

    Like, right wing nut jobs would lose their shit if they learned a government office was buying fresh fruits for workers but most of it was going bad and being thrown out. But that happened every day for a while.

    There’s also been a lot of “why is this machine still running? How much are we paying AWS for this??”

    There’s also been a lot of "we don’t need to do accessibility on our website because most of our customers don’t care, and no one’s making us ".


  • I have very fond memories of a pandemic DND game where the players were making their way through a large puzzle sort of encounter. The confusion, the despair, the panic - so good. And the rising mood when they started to figure it out! And the triumph when they escaped! It was fantastic. One of the players said afterwards “I’ve never been so stressed before” and I was like “that is the greatest compliment you could give me”

    I miss that group. Alas, when the pandemic wound down they all returned to real life interests. We’ll never know what the gnome depot was up to in their corporate office, now.



  • What if leveling up didn’t make number get big, but instead gave you more options in a fight?

    Horizontal progression is pretty cool .

    Unfortunately, a lot of people don’t want that. They want to feel cool and competent without actually doing anything. That’s not to say like you need to “earn” your fun or whatever. But that the progress quest number go up don’t think too hard is immensely popular with a lot of people. They don’t want to be challenged.

    And that’s fine. It’s a game. It’s just not a game I want to play all the time.






  • Some people are bad at working remote, and want to drag the rest of us down with them, too.

    Yes, it’s a slightly different skill set to work remote. You have to be better at the written word. You can’t just roll up to someone’s desk and be like “have a minute?” (which is fucking awful anyway). You also need to be responsive and set your status appropriately. A lot of coworkers just wander off and leave their slack status as active. To my mind if you’re running an errand longer than taking a dump, you should update your status.




  • The left continues to treat them with kid gloves,

    This has generally been bothering me. You’ll have someone on the far right say like “We should kill the jews”, and I say “We should stop that guy. Like, I’m okay with someone doing violence to that nazi” and people are like “whoa whoa whoa we can’t have VIOLENCE.” So basically the right wing can do and say whatever, but everyone else has to hold themselves to pristine standards and just take it.

    “Cops brutalize family and shoot their dog”. “Maybe we should fight back.” “Whoa whoa whoa violent speech is unacceptable bro.” Like, ok, I guess I’ll just get shot quietly.




  • You think there’s no culture in rural areas?

    There is less cultural output because there are fewer people. There’s probably a thousand new bands that started in Brooklyn this month. You just can’t have those numbers out in the sticks because you don’t have the people. There literally aren’t enough singers.

    Culture matters. People interacting and inspiring each other matters. It’s not that there’s nothing happening out in Wisconsin or wherever, but there’s less. There are fewer people to be doing stuff!

    I almost wrote a preemptive response about “where does your food come from”. I don’t think most of the people living outside of cities are farmers.

    A quick search says

    The Midwest rounds out the top five states with the most farmers:
    
        Missouri (162,345, or 5% of the labor force)
        Iowa (145,432 or 9% of the labor force)
        Ohio (130,439 or 2% of the labor force)
        Oklahoma (130,434 or 7% of the labor force)
    

    I don’t know if https://usafacts.org/articles/farmer-demographics/ is a real site but it would be awkward for someone to make up these numbers.

    That’s a lot of people in the sense of like “I couldn’t have that many people at my birthday party” but not a lot of people compared to like, who lives in major cities. Bushwick, Brooklyn is one neighborhood and has like 130k people.

    Food is important but probably not a justification for holding everyone else hostage. Especially when most people living in those areas aren’t even growing food. (Some are second order involved, like the guy who works the Laundromat helps the farmer or whatever). Also especially when the efforts being stymied would help people, like student loan forgiveness or federally funded school meals.

    The urban liberal doesn’t consider the rural conservative POV, and they want to apply their position nationally. Should the rural conservative have no useful defense against that?

    The rural conservative POV is utterly poisoned by decades of racial violence and regressive policies. There’s like a mass shooting every day. Climate change is going to fuck us. Conservatism is not an okay world view.

    That said, the answer is probably local government for things that are actually local. Environmental issues cannot be local. You can’t have this town dumping mercury into the water and pretending that’s just fine. But for something like “we want a bike lane here” or “we want a library that’s open weekends” that’s doesn’t need to be federal. But if “local” means “no queers allowed to get married here” then the locals can fuck themselves.

    Guns are a whole separate wedge issue. I think they should at least be treated the same as cars- license, registration, insurance, mechanisms to remove the license like DUI. I don’t know how close to reality that is.

    I wrote this on my phone so it’s not my best work.


  • Cities matter more. Sorry, but that’s the reality.

    Cities are where people live. People matter.

    Cities are where culture happens. Culture matters. You’re not going to have a big art/music/anything scene in bumbleweed, NE because there aren’t enough people there to constitute a scene.

    Cities are where economy happens. Money moving around matters. There are more transactions per day in the corner shop by me than a whole week in some country town with 700 residents.

    Rural people still have the Senate and local government. Their rep in the house (which should be expanded) also should speak up for their region.

    Everyone deserves some minimum respect, but the idea that nowhere-utah is just as important as Queens is insane. A minority holding the majority garbage is not good. Especially when that minority seems fixated on terrible ideas like climate change denial and xenophobia.