NYC is one of the few places in the USA where you can mostly just get on a train or bus and go. It’s pretty great. There’s room for improvement - some lines are better than others, and off peak you can wait half an hour if you just miss it. But mostly it just works

I got the vaccine as soon as it was available. A good friend procrastinated. We saw their little nephew together and hung out indoors one day. The nephew got the flu. My friend got the flu. I seem to be fine. My friend was bedridden for about a week.

They got their flu and COVID shots after they recovered, at least.

I’ve read your post a dozen times and I’m confused.

Are you at the $5 million cap in this scenario? You’re certainly not going to waste away with $500k/year coming in, labor free.

Or are you closer to median income of like $80k, and thus have no funds for a big passion project?

Either way, you can always pool resources and form an organization of some sort. We don’t really want a ton of power collected in individuals. Especially not if the only reason they have that power is because they had money.

No one needs more than $5 million. That’s enough for a conservative investment portfolio to give you a mid six figure income without doing any labor. Watch TV all day and eat chips, still net six figures.

Maybe then no one can afford mega mansions and mega yachts, but I’m okay with that. We don’t need that much concentration of wealth.

Spend billions of dollars on public education, with a focus on critical analysis, starting 50 years ago.

Failing that, I don’t know, get rid of the ultra wealthy?

I don’t know how I feel about ai slop that promotes good ideas. That sounds like a deal with the devil. But if there is going to be slop, I’d rather it be promoting stuff like “workers together are stronger”

People need to stop watching slop. But I feel like the kind of idiots easily swayed by slop are also the kinds that won’t stop watching it.

It kind of bothers me that people use “introvert” to mean like “crippling social anxiety and agoraphobia”.

Maybe it’s just online spaces accumulate more people who identify with those disorders, and “introvert” sounds nicer .

Yeah I’m at a job that pays dirt, and doesn’t pay for holidays. I asked my boss if he could just say my assignment on Thanksgiving was to eat dinner, and pay me for the day. He was like “mm maybe”, but had to ask his boss. She, allegedly, said no.

I’m not watching a video but based on the title “capitalism is theft” I can guess what it says.

The problem is we can barely get people to understand that the company is not their friend and they have any rights at all.

You can’t teach a child calculus if they can barely do arithmetic. People are fish that don’t realize there’s water. It’s going to be hard to get them to build a space program. A noble goal, but not one with an easy direct path.

I feel like every retro I’ve attended has been a farce.

“What went bad? We said doing it this way would be harder and more risk prone. Management insisted we do it that way, and it took longer than and caused a site outage.”

"What should we do differently?’

“Listen to the team next time”

“That won’t happen”

Tabletop RPGs are a good and cost effective hobby. You can play DND with the free “SRD” rules posted online, but you won’t get the fancy pictures and all the extras.

There are other games like it that are even cheaper. My personal favorite is Fate. Free rules, only needs four six sided dice.

The main problem is finding a good group to play with. DND is mega popular so if you’re just looking for social, it’s a good starting point. If you’re not into fantasy, you can branch off into other games later.

My friend is not vegan and married to a vegan. Somehow they make it work. Their daughter is being raised vegetarian.

Personally I would not be happy with someone who’s like aggressively carnivorous. I’m not yet all the way vegan, but someone who was like “I NEED MEAT!!” would be a bad fit for long term relationships.

In the US I think it varies a lot from town to town and teacher to teacher.

I had a history teacher in like 10th grade (age ~15). He spent the first bulk of a lesson one day telling us stuff. Everyone was wrapped up in what a good story this was about whatever. Then, in the end of the class he was like “everything I just told you is bullshit. It’s alterations, omissions, and lies to make the story sound better for the victors.”

I don’t remember what the actual subject was, but it was a good lesson in not blindly accepting what a charismatic guy in a suit tells you.

Depending on how the html is structured, you might be able to use adblock or tamper monkey to filter it out (in a browser. Apps are less supportive of this)

I have several stories on this I like to tell.

I worked at a startup in NYC that was doing job-search related stuff. Find job postings, get resume advice, that kind of stuff. Someone in the customer service department found an article online about salaries, shared it, and then people were talking about how much they got paid. Management came down hard on this, and said it was a fireable offense to talk about salary. Everyone got real quiet on the topic after that. Was it illegal for them to do that? Maybe! But laws only matter when they’re enforced, and a bunch of entry level people making $30-50k a year don’t have the means to launch a legal challenge. That’s even if there’s enough solidarity to try, and the effort won’t be scuttled by scabs and bootlickers.

For extra irony, a couple years later the company launched an “Are you getting paid enough?” salary comparison tool.

I worked at a different startup in NYC. This one loved data. Data data data. They had t-shirts made that said stuff like “Data doesn’t care about your feelings” or whatever.

People started agitating about salary transparency. They wanted to know how much people were being made, because there was a sense that not everyone was getting paid the same for the same work. Also, some of us had in secret started comparing notes, and found some wide gaps.

Well, the CEO wasn’t having it. He said “we have salary bands”, but wouldn’t provide more detail on the range of the bands, who was in what band, and how it all worked. Just we have salary bands and they’re fair.

People didn’t like that, so he tried changing tactics. He said, “Who here thinks they’re being paid too much money? No one? No one wants a pay cut. Right. So that’s why we’re not going to release the specifics.” As if the only solution to Amy being paid too little is to lower Bob’s pay.

This is the same CEO, at the same “we love data” company, that when people brought up studies about four day workweeks being more effective, just shut it down with “We’re not doing that.”

Management and ownership don’t care. They don’t care about what’s legal or just. They care about power, and profit as a close second. I knew a guy that worked in a factory, and the owner reportedly would say stuff like “If you assholes unionize I will burn this place to the ground, and I don’t care if you’re inside or not.”

There need to be institutions, with teeth, to stop these kinds of things. If ownership even whispers an anti-union sentiment, they should lose everything.

Many times the people who would make the best decisions are not authorized to make decisions.

Should we go into the office every day? Well the workers say no, objective productivity measurements say no, the environment says no, but some insipid sack of shit feels like it’s better.

Should we spend twenty minutes improving this process? No, some higher up who doesn’t understand software development decided that we don’t do it that way. Keep doing it manually.

Should we compensate people well enough so they don’t leave after a year or two? No, pay the absolute minimum and keep hiring entry level people. Saving so much on labor costs!

I’d rather have health than maybe marginally better cooking experiences

the truth is that what we did didn’t affect them as much as we expected, and most people don’t care as well :(

Most people don’t really care about anything. They won’t put up with a little inconvenience. Worse than toddlers.

I fundamentally disagree that users should not be allowed to install whatever they want from wherever they want.

You can install whatever dodgy file from wherever you want. I (and many others) don’t think that should be the default