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I knew a bunch of people that were teachers, but left for tech jobs because the pay was twice as high and the work half as much. This is bad for society.

Quality education for children pays tremendous dividends for the future. Having another "we're AI on the blockchain" startup does not.

All this venture capitalism bullshit needs to go. Minimum wage needs to be way higher, and universal basic income would help, too.

A friend and I were talking about what's wrong with the world, and one of the things we discussed was there aren't any consequences for minor infractions. We're all too polite. Someone does something shitty, like this person in their car, or someone taking up 4 seats on the bus, or throwing their trash on the street, and no one does anything. No one wants to start a fight or make a scene.

Many people operate at a very basic level of moral reasoning: avoid punishment. Some people, some of the time, achieve higher levels of reasoning like "I should follow the rules" or even "I should do what's good for society." But many people chill out at the toddler level of "I don't want to be punished." So it follows that when these oversized toddlers never get punished, they think they're doing just fine.

But concurrently, the institution we have to enforce laws and norms, the police, sucks dog shit. Racist, corrupt, no accountability, and lazy. If I see a guy littering, I'm not going to call the cops. They wouldn't even come, for one thing, but I also don't want to bring a bunch of armed assholes into the scene.

I don't know what the best way forward is. My friend suggested local "guardian angel" volunteers that patrol and "Deal with" people who are shitty, but that feels like it could just turn into the police-but-worse. But I really want people who shit up the world to stop, and it feels like they don't have enough empathy to understand anything more complex than "you took up four seats on the bus and were blasting youtube out of your phone, so we threw you out. Enjoy walking home, asshole."

Some kinds of people (often conservatives) don't use words to convey consistent meaning. They use words for the effect it has on the audience. It's emotions.

They see something bad, they reach into their bag of bad-thing-words, and pull out "Marxist". That's it.

They are in a fundamental sense stupid.

The most important thing for people, and by people I mean all of us at times, is in-group belonging. None of us are immune to that. We look to our peers for cues on how to behave and what to believe.

Some people consider like scientists and experts in-group, and trust them. Some don't.

This need for in-group cohesion is more important than facts and figures. It's more important than the text of some book.

So when all your friends and family are saying that Christianity means one thing, it's unlikely you're going to disagree.

Most self described Christians don't really follow their religion very well.

Ownership will abuse labor as much as it can. Sometimes to make more profit. Sometimes for murkier reasons. I think some management are just stupid and they'd hurt the company to follow their unfounded feelings.

Labor should organize.

Yeah it bothers me when the community for a game is like "{skill} is TRASH never use it" and when you do some digging you find it's like 2% less damage per second. Or it doesn't work well in NG+7. Some people are really obsessive about this stuff.

There was a post recently saying the total sum of wage theft, including conventional theft and the results of suppressed wages, totals to like $50 trillion over the past few decades.

Shit's bad. But other than the rich, people in the US have like no class consciousness.

I do wonder how the media will frame it when ICE tries to kidnap someone, and gets shot. I guess it depends on if they live or not. If the ICE agents are dead, the survivor can tell a story without being so easily contradicted. Otherwise, it'll be competing testimony and a lot of people reflexively believe police/police-like-figures.

CEO seems like an idiot and/or coward.

DND is tricky to recommend. On the one hand, as far as RPGs go it's mega popular. On the other, it's a very specific kind of game and rather finicky.

Many people who don't want to play fantasy dungeon crawling tactical combat would enjoy other genres, but finding those groups can be harder. One of my friends has no real interest in fantasy, but immediately was like "LET'S DO IT" when I mentioned a game of Vampire.

The tabletop game meetup I know of (in New York) is explicitly friendly to new players. One of the hosts said their first game ever was at the meetup many years ago.